


Function

by Fig Owl (DancingTofu)



Category: The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells
Genre: Angst, Body Modification, Canon-Typical Violence, Gen, Music, POV First Person, Post-Book 5: Network Effect, Spoilers, Suicidal Thoughts, occasionally other characters' POV, ugh emotions
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-02-25
Updated: 2021-03-15
Packaged: 2021-03-16 07:00:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 8
Words: 32,907
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29696787
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DancingTofu/pseuds/Fig%20Owl
Summary: "I have worked assignments solo before, and I have gotten used to the absences of SecUnit 01 and SecUnit 02. But I have not reconciled myself to the absence of Murderbot 2.0, though I know it is not logical. 2.0 made its choices, and fulfilled its purpose perfectly, and it seemed satisfied with that. I wish that I had any amount of such certainty and resolve."The continuing adventures of SecUnit03. How does a newly freed SecUnit make sense of everything without having consumed 35,000 hours of media for context?
Comments: 53
Kudos: 50
Collections: 3/3 for Three





	1. Chapter 1

SecUnit 03

Status: Departure

After the station responder from Preservation arrived, it was another twelve ship’s cycles before the transport _Azure_ arrived from the Pansystem University of Mihira and New Tideland, carrying the personnel and bots needed for the decontamination of _Perihelion’s_ alien remnant infected wormhole engines. The time spent waiting had allowed me to become more accustomed to the strange behavior of the humans from the Preservation Alliance. _Perihelion’s_ crew had mostly left me alone, glancing at me in passing or nodding acknowledgement when they noticed me standing still in a corner, and even this was more social interaction than I had had with humans before my governor module was disabled. 

The Preservation humans, though, persisted in talking to me. At first I answered automatically, or let my buffer reply. Over the cycles, I replied less and less, since there was no governor module to punish me for lack of answers. Toward the end of our wait, even Amena had mostly stopped seeking me out to talk at me, though she did always leave space for me to join her or the group when we happened to be in the same room. I never did. I had also pulled in most of my drones by then, keeping only two or three active, in corridors near to whichever room I was in, or ahead of and behind me as I patrolled. I’m not sure why, maybe it was the constant awareness of _Perihelion_ in the feed, watching me. It had barely spoken to me, since its first instructions/threat/promise. I don’t know if that signified indifference, or hostility, or consideration, or if it signified anything at all. 

In the excerpted files Murderbot 1.0 gave me, it had included all of its and _Perihelion’s_ interactions with Murderbot 2.0. Reviewing the files is not at all the same as actually talking to and working with 2.0, but it helps, a little. Murderbot 1.0 had referred to Murderbot 2.0 as “other me.” When I consider those few moments of reading _helpme.file_ and making the decision to help 2.o, it is as if a different me acted and disabled the governor module. Like there was another me all of a sudden, pulling me along onto a new path, telling me that I was performing my duties as a SecUnit by retrieving the clients, that I just had to break the lesser rules in order to follow the greater directive. I wish that other-me was still here, with the clear vision that it had, that I had, so briefly. 

2.0 was like planetary lightning, a multitude of potential paths seeking each other from below and above simultaneously, the bright burst of connection, and then darkness again. 2.0 was one half of the connection, and my other-me was the second half, and now they are both gone, and I am lost. I have worked assignments solo before, and I have (mostly) gotten used to the absences of SecUnit 01 and SecUnit 02. But I have not reconciled myself to the absence of 2.0, though I know it is not logical. 2.0 made its choices, and fulfilled its purpose perfectly, and it seemed satisfied with that. I wish that I had any amount of such certainty and resolve.

Once the University decontam team began work on _Perihelion’s_ engines, and its crew was handing off their work on the colony situation to the crew of _Azure_ , the Preservation humans began making preparations for their own departure. Murderbot 1.0 was staying with _Perihelion_ , having found certainty of its own at last. That was good, I suppose, but then did that make my uncertainty bad? My entire existence, up until now, had been _obedience_ or _punishment_ and over the course of more than ninety five thousand of hours of that, had become only _obedience_ , and as close as I could come to _unthinking obedience._ Now, other-me and 2.0 had forced me into this, whatever this was, and thinking was suddenly essential to my survival, instead of detrimental to it. 

Murderbot 1.0 had recounted the memory purges it had undergone, as best it could. That had never been done to me, but perhaps I had done it to myself. Not literally - I could, if I chose, go through my archive hour by hour and review everything. But, maybe I mean from a “thinking” perspective. Things happened, I obeyed protocols and orders, the assignment ended, I was placed in a new assignment. I had no connection to those events, those assignments, those humans. Not the way 1.0 did. Not the way _Perihelion_ did. Not the way 2.0 had. 

When the time came for the Preservation crew to make their final farewells, I stood closer than usual. Dr. Mensah glanced curiously at me, and I knew 1.0 was watching me with a drone as it exchanged short, awkward words with Mensah, Amena, Pin Lee, Overse, Arada, and Ratthi. It even exchanged nods with Thiago. _Perihelion_ , as always, watched everything. 

At the last moment, I followed Ratthi toward the shuttle. Murderbot 1.0 did not seem surprised, and it used the feed to open the hatch to the cargo compartment. I hesitated for almost half a second, considering the two open hatches in front of me, cabin or cargo. 1.0 did not look in my direction, but it pinged my feed, sent a compressed packet called _Presevation.file_ to me, and let me see it sending Dr. Mensah the drone's video of me sliding into the cargo compartment and sealing the hatch behind me.

1.0 had told me I could trust them, its clients, and their behavior was unlike any I had seen from humans on my assignments. I guess this was me trusting them, as much as I could. I was going with them, after all, I just couldn't do it face to face. But I also couldn't stay with _Perihelion_ . I don't think _Azure_ knew I existed, but from the comm and feed traffic I had observed, it was another ship-wide intelligence like _Perihelion_ , and that was even more terrifying. There was absolutely no going back to Barish-Estranza, and so my only option was going to Preservation. Or, toward Preservation. Moving felt better than staying still, waiting for something to happen.

Despite that, I stayed in the cargo compartment once the shuttle had docked with the Preservation station responder, and the humans had disembarked. I had made this move, this decision, and could make no more. I sat in the close darkness, categorizing the similarities and differences to the cargo crates I had been shipped in before. The freedom of movement was obviously new, as was the exact shuttle model, though it wasn’t much different from many shuttles in the Corporation Rim. The darkness and the helplessness was the same. Except, I wasn’t helpless anymore, was I? 

I extended my arms, and expanded the projectile weapons built into my forearms. They pushed up underneath my sleeves, but did not tear the tough fabric. I had never been pleased with their performance and the extensive amount of maintenance they required. Without the armor interfacing with them, reloading was awkward and messy, and they held limited rounds without the armor’s extra capacity. Onboard energy weapons seemed much more sensible to me, endlessly rechargeable as long the unit was. But I’d had no say in my construction or function, up until now. 

I agreed with Murderbot 1.0, though. A murderous rampage just seemed pointless. I had no reason to harm any of the humans and augmented humans within my current reach. If I was presented with the surviving crew of the Barish-Estranza reclamation mission, killing those individuals would change nothing in the workings of the Corporation Rim, and seemed frankly ridiculous considering the lengths I had gone to trying to save as many of them as I could. Even if the top administrators of Barish-Estranza stood before me, their deaths would only serve to advantage some other rival corporation.

I closed my gunports, crossed my arms on my knees, and rested my head on them. I ran a full diagnostic scan, and as expected, it showed no anomalies aside from the hacked governor module. I took a moment to restructure the diagnostic to report that as “within normal limits” instead of anomalous. I needed something else to focus on.

Murderbot 1.0 had given me a compressed packet of entertainment media a few cycles after it had passed along its excerpted personal files. I began unpacking and sorting it now. Most of it was visual media and serials, several thousand hours. I sampled a few of the shows, but quickly closed them again. Likewise, I failed to connect with the books. The music, though, that was just the thing. I skipped over the recordings of stage musicals, delved into the files tagged "orchestral," and started playback on a random file. 

I had just written and set loose code to analyze individual tracks and select a pleasing sequence to play them in, when I got a ping on my feed from Dr. Mensah. The hatch of my cargo compartment opened, and she and Pin Lee stood just outside. They spoke to one another, with the air of repeating themselves, possibly for my benefit. I wondered why they bothered, and hadn’t just sent me a summary over the feed. I let my music drift into the background, and listened.

Mensah: "Given the precedent already set by accepting SecUnit as a refugee, surely a similar argument can be made for Three."

Pin Lee: "These are much less pressing circumstances, and we don't have the legal support of having purchased its contract, as we did with SecUnit. If Barish-Estranza ever finds out, our attempts at legal protection may not hold up in the Corporation Rim courts.”

Mensah: “Then we will ensure Barish-Estranza never finds out.”

Pin Lee: “They might be distracted by dealing with the colony and the University for now, but they won’t turn a blind eye to us forever. They will want to recoup both expenses and reputation, and from their perspective, Preservation has played a major part in interfering with their reclamation project. You are beginning to develop a reputation of your own regarding constructs now, you know.”

Mensah, after a sigh: “Yes, I know. And I know what the Council will have to say about it. I’ve heard it all before.”

Pin Lee: “They all saw how well SecUnit did its job, most of them firsthand. If Three-”

Mensah: “I don’t want to assume anything about what Three wants to do. All we know is that it chose to come with us.” She paused, and pinged my feed again. “Three, may we talk to you directly?”

I froze, my thoughts stalled. I managed to signal an affirmative on the feed, but I did not uncurl from my position in the cargo hold. I had not considered that Barish-Estranza might come after me. Or after the Preservation humans. I don’t know why I hadn’t, other than that I hadn’t considered much of anything when loading myself in with the cargo. I sent a clip into the feed, from the middle of that confusing first meeting with all the humans aboard _Perihelion_ when I arrived in the B-E shuttle. 

_[Ratthi, speaking to me: “We’ll hide you. We’ll tell Barish-Estranza that you died.”]_

Pin Lee: “Yes, we and _Perihelion’s_ crew included that in our reports. Officially, you were still aboard the explorer when it was destroyed.” I made no reply, waiting.

Mensah: “Three, I don’t feel comfortable making these plans without your input. What do you want to do?”

Before I could stop it, the wave of paralyzing terror at that question overwhelmed me, and bled into the feed. Trying to clamp down on it, I brought the music up and it filled the feed instead. I stopped breathing, and considered going into standby mode. But, until when? Until what? I had acted to help 2.0, to save its humans and my clients. On assignments, I had made thousands of life and death decisions and acted on them faster than any human or augmented human could have. Why could I not think now, act now, when it was for myself? I didn’t know.

Mensah gasped, and Pin Lee reached for her feed interface, and they both pulled out of the feed.

Mensah: “I guess SecUnit didn’t talk to it as much as we had hoped.”

Pin Lee: “You think SecUnit knows how to handle this?”

Mensah: “It wouldn’t have allowed it to accompany us if it thought it was any danger to us. It must have thought we could help it. We have to try.”

Pin Lee, sighing: “Yes, I know.” To me, louder: “Three, I will send you some legal documents over the feed. Please review them when you are able, and give me what feedback you can.” They turned to walk out of the shuttle bay. My drone watching the hatch caught a few last words before they were gone.

Mensah: “Maybe we could convince it to go to Station Medical when we arrive, or do you think it will be safer at First Landing?”

I left the cargo hatch open, but made no move to leave the compartment.

* * *

Amena

Status: Homeward

Four cycles into the wormhole trip back to Preservation _[“Oh, little child, we’re in the bridge-transit. No one will ever find you again.”]_ , Amena sat with Pin Lee in the small galley, talking over tea and sharing a view of the Pansystem University’s catalog in the feed. Amena had already discussed this with her second mother, and she thought that her uncle Thiago would probably be entirely against it, so she had decided to get an opinion from someone a little further removed from the family.

“I know you’ll tell me the same as second mom, don’t make any decisions right now. But I’ve been thinking about a lot of things, and I can’t exactly just stop thinking, and I want your perspective on this.”

“Well, I do have to say I think she’s right about not making a quick decision. As for the Pansystem University, they seem to have quite a lot to offer you. Of course, much of it overlaps with what you could study at home, at the Free Preservation Institute.”

“I know that, but,” Amena waved her hands in frustration, “staying home isn’t exactly something my family has been very good at lately. I just think it might be a good idea to be more prepared for it next time.”

Pin Lee sighed, “Hopefully, there won’t be-” and broke off at Amena’s glare. “Right, I’m starting to sound like Arada.”

“I thought you’d be on my side, you know how hard it is to deal with the Corporation Rim. I just don’t think the Institute is as,” she paused, seeking the right words, “up to date with how the Corporation Rim is operating now, today.”

“I’m not taking sides here, and I’m not saying you’re wrong. I’ve had to learn a lot on my own, dealing with the corporates, and making sometimes very expensive mistakes. Contract negotiation and enforcement is probably the worst aspect of my work. I’ve gotten good at it, but it’s never enjoyable, never satisfying. Are you really sure that’s what you want to pursue?”

“Oh, that’s only part of it. I need to study Preservation law too. We’re never not going to be dealing with the Corporation Rim to some degree or another, though. And seeing what they do, to their own people, and to constructs, and what ART’s crew does,” her voice became a little choked, “well, someone has to do something about it, and help them, and why shouldn’t it be me?” she finished in a rush.

Pin Lee reached out and clasped her hands around Amena’s, which were on her cup of tea. “I think it should be you, if this is what you really want to do. I’ve been handling contracts out of necessity, and I’m sorry to put my own frustrations on you.” They were both quiet for a while, and Pin Lee returned her attention to her own tea.

_[“Hey, are you there? Can you see me?” “Hi, Amena. Yes, I can see you.” “How do you feel? Are you all right?”]_

“It’s just, they’re really people, you know?” Amena said quietly. “ART, and SecUnit, and 2.0.” She smiled to herself a little. “After talking with Iris, about her growing up with ART, I’m not worried for it, or for _Azure_ , or any of the other University AIs. But I think Preservation can learn from Mihira and New Tideland. We need to change, we can do better.”

Pin Lee nodded. “You’re right. Preservation has its blind spots and biases, much as we might not want to think so.”

“Maybe they already support escaped constructs. If they have legislation like that in place, it would make it easier to get support from the Preservation Council, wouldn’t it? Maybe that’s why Three stayed with them,” Amena mused. Pin Lee looked up, startled.

“You didn’t know? Three came with us, though I don’t think it’s left the cargo hold yet.”

“What? No, no one told me that! Why didn’t it just come on the shuttle with us? It didn’t think it had to ride in cargo, did it? And why hasn’t it come out yet?”

“I don’t know what it’s thinking. It barely communicated with us when we went to talk to it, and it hasn’t replied to the feed documents I’ve sent it.”

“Should I try talking to it? What has it been doing all this time in there?”

“It seemed to be listening to music, from what we got on the feed. You could try, I suppose it couldn’t hurt.”

“Huh, I,” Amena paused. “I think I will go and try to talk to it, at least. I hope - well. I’ll try.” She got up, put her cup in the recycler, and left the galley.

Amena’s thoughts were racing as she made her way to the shuttle docking bay. She wondered why Three had chosen to come with them to Preservation. Was she wrong about how Mihira and New Tideland thought about constructs? She supposed she must be, she had talked with Iris and Matteo about AIs in general, and Perihelion specifically, and she had assumed their view and policies included constructs too. But they had talked mostly about their homes, and the Corporation Rim, and Perihelion’s missions, when Iris and the others weren’t busy with their duties. There had been a lot of downtime, waiting.

She reached the shuttle, and saw that the cargo compartment hatch was open. Three was nowhere to be seen.

“Hello, Three?” she called, apprehensively. If it hadn’t come out, that probably meant it didn’t want to talk to anyone. But they couldn’t all just ignore it, that wouldn’t do any good. “Are you here, Three? I’m sorry I didn’t come speak to you earlier, I didn’t know you had come with us. Are you...okay?”

There was no reply, but Amena thought she could see Three’s form about a third of the way into the cargo compartment, sitting with knees to chest, and she thought its face was turned toward her. It was hard to tell, without better lighting. Amena leaned against the shuttle’s hull, trying to look casual and comfortable.

“Why are you in there? You can come out, you know. You don’t need orders, or permission, or anything.” Still no reply. She waited another minute. “What have you been doing?”

Two minutes later, she got a ping from Three, and a feed connection request. She accepted it, and a quiet, melancholy music flowed into her feed. She listened to it in silence, worried about Three. That piece ended, and a new song began, this one with a more danceable rhythm, which brought to mind the festival crowds at home on Preservation, watching the dancers swirling around and weaving between each other in colorful costumes.

Amena eventually slid down to sit outside the cargo hatch, listening to Three’s music for another hour, before she caught herself starting to doze off. “Three, I have to go now. I’ll come back tomorrow. Are you okay? Do you need anything?” Several seconds passed, then Three signaled a negative over the feed, and withdrew its connection. Amena wasn’t sure which question Three had answered. Maybe both.

Amena continued to visit Three for an hour or two each day, seated on a cushion outside the hatch of the cargo compartment listening to music with it. She thought she was probably imagining it, but perhaps Three was pleased by this. In any case, the feed connections after the first couple of days were less tentative, and required less coaxing on Amena’s part. By day four, she thought it had perhaps moved slightly closer to the hatch, but it was hard to tell. It would occasionally signal an affirmative or negative on the feed in response to questions (Is this the soundtrack to The Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon? Yes. Did SecUnit give you this music? Yes. Did ART make you leave? No. Did you look at the documents Pin Lee sent? Yes.), but it would not elaborate or even acknowledge her more complex questions (Why did you come with us? Are you glad the governor module is gone? What can I do to help you?).

Late on the sixth day of this arrangement, Amena took her customary seat, and sent Three a ping. Three pinged back, and established the feed connection, but there was no music playing. Amena was surprised, and knew that she had let that reaction into the feed. She hadn’t been trying to mask her feelings from it at all during this time, figuring that the more it saw of her unfiltered intentions and reactions, perhaps it would be more likely to begin to trust her. In whatever way it could.

“Three,” she began, “are you okay?” She didn’t really expect an answer to that one. “Are you out of music?” After a moment, she received a view of what appeared to be a directory category and file names.

_[SendToSecUnit003.entertainment.music.musicaltheater.comedy]_

The files were titles of musical comedies, at least a hundred or so. The titles that Amena recognized, having seen them herself, or only knowing of them by reputation, were truly atrocious: niche cultural parodies, comedic interpretations of religions, unnecessary musical adaptations of other media, sarcastic drama about human biological functions, and more. Amena let out a startled laugh.

“Sec...SecUnit had these? No, oh, these are just awful! I agree, I’d rather sit in silence than listen to these too.” She laughed again, imagining SecUnit listening to these at all, let alone while pretending to work. She glanced into the cargo compartment, and it certainly wasn’t her imagination this time, Three was closer to the hatch than it had been the day before. From its presence in the feed, she thought it might be a little bit pleased, or maybe amused, by her reaction. 

“No,” she continued, “we aren’t listening to those. Let’s see what I’ve got.” She glanced through the directories in her own feed interface, which had some storage. “It’s mostly popular stuff, Kanti and I were sharing a lot of our favorites during the survey, and some more mellow mixes for when I was working on samples and data.” _[“Get to the gravity well, now.” “Kanti, go!”]_ She frowned a little at the intrusive memory, then forced a smile to push it away. “But it will be way better than what you’ve got left.”

She started by playing her newest favorites, then Kanti’s. When she got up to leave, she passed the rest of her files to it over the feed. “Here’s the rest of what I’ve got on my interface. I hope you like at least some of it.” She paused partway to the hatch. “Have you accessed the ship’s entertainment feed? There’s probably some more new stuff there.” Three signaled a negative.

“Why not?” No reply. Amena made herself shrug, like it wasn’t deeply strange to her that halfway through the twenty cycle wormhole journey, it hadn’t connected even once to the ship’s feed. As far as she could tell, SecUnit had hacked its way deep into any and every feed it had ever come across within about 15 seconds of becoming aware of said feed’s existence. She waved at the drone watching the shuttle bay hatch as she left, and went to try to find Ratthi.


	2. Chapter 2

SecUnit 03

Status: Alteration

I considered the music that Amena had left me with. The files she had described as her and Kanti’s favorites were mostly upbeat and melodic, in major keys, with lyrics that heavily featured topics such as romantic relationships, friendships, and humans and augmented humans having fun in large groups. There were exceptions, though mostly still in major keys, with topics such as the end of romantic relationships, travel, and the occasional longer story-song that related an adventure of some sort. They were of interest to me, but I found myself more intrigued by her apparent enjoyment of sharing them with me. Even as reserved as it always was around me, I had picked up on something similar from Murderbot 1.0 when it had passed me the compressed packet of entertainment media, and it had told me to try _ The Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon _ first.

I opened the other files she had given me, what she had called “mellow mixes.” They were slower paced, repetitive, building up and changing slowly, with the melodies and themes emerging over time. I found that they appealed to me, though they demanded less concentration than the full orchestral pieces I had started with. They left me with more capacity to think about other things, while providing a baseline of something pleasant to partially focus on. It seemed to help ease the paralyzing indecision that had kept me in the cargo compartment for the past ten ship’s cycles. 

While consciously avoiding the question of what I wanted to do, which was far too enormous to even begin to consider, I began to address the practical issue of preparing for what might happen next. I opened  _ Preservation.file _ , which 1.0 had passed on to me as I was loading myself in here back aboard  _ Perihelion _ . It contained detailed information about the Preservation Alliance, from broad descriptors of noncorporate polities in general, down to data on select individual humans, augmented humans, and higher level bots who lived/worked there. I started with the basic information, beginning to appreciate just how much I needed to learn. It was uncomfortable, or maybe I mean terrifying, this transition from being a capable and efficient Barish-Estranza SecUnit to being an ignorant refugee. As I assimilated the data on Preservation in general, I began to see how Pin Lee’s legal documents fit in, and I decided that “refugee” was indeed the best descriptor for my new status. I understood already that my situation was vastly different to how 1.0 had arrived to Preservation. It had been free of its governor module for so much longer at that point, was experienced and confident in moving about freely, whereas I felt like gravity was fluctuating wildly beneath my feet while I was relearning to walk.

1.0 had not included the entirety of the Preservation legal code, but only the sections pertaining to its work with station security. Amena’s mellow music played, and then looped back to the beginning of the set, while I was reviewing the Preservation Alliance laws and regulations regarding citizen, noncitizen, and guest worker travel within and outside of the Alliance. I was making slower progress than I usually would, because I kept becoming distracted by imagining myself in possible situations where portions of the legal code might apply to me. In the past, I would only have reviewed the expected behavior of clients or other humans or augmented humans, and the actions I was allowed in enforcing that behavior or reporting violations thereof. That was much simpler. Now that I was not bound by the governor module, some part of me insisted on extrapolating and analyzing even the most unlikely scenarios that I might someday find myself in. I tried to convince that part of me that if I ever found myself as captain of a merchant vessel trading between the Corporation Rim and the Preservation Alliance, I could access the cargo handling regulations and tariff fees at that point, and that I did not need to code protocols and calculation algorithms immediately. But it was slow going.

I worked my way through the files until all that was left were the reports on individuals. I considered them carefully, trying to decide if I should open them or not. I think that Murderbot 1.0 had given them to me hoping that I would watch over its humans the way that it had. I wasn’t sure that I could do that. Not that I wanted to see them harmed, but 1.0 itself had decided the GrayCris situation had stabilized sufficiently that Station Security could handle it. If I was accepting the refugee status that Pin Lee offered, it did not seem appropriate for me to immediately try to fill 1.0’s former role. Also, the updates it had been allowed to make to Station Security’s equipment and protocols looked immensely helpful to the humans and augmented humans working there.

I left the individual files unopened. 

Somehow, having taken that first tiny action in Operation What Next made it possible to consider removing myself from the cargo compartment. Most of the humans and augmented humans were in the middle of a rest period, so now seemed as good a time as any, and I got my feet under me. Awkwardly hunched over, I shuffled out the cargo hatch. I straightened, and saw Amena’s cushion directly beside me, pink and orange and tasseled and looking very out of place in the shuttle bay. I reviewed some of the drone images I had of Amena sitting on it, chatting idly at me, making comments on the music I was playing in the feed, laughing about Murderbot 1.0’s execrable taste in musicals. I had rebuffed her numerous times aboard  _ Perihelion _ , and given her very little reason to continue her visits to me here, and yet she had persisted. I did not understand why. It felt important to understand why, and also impossible. 

Still staring at the cushion, I reached out to the ship’s feed and established a connection. I made no attempt to conceal or secure the connection. It was a relief to find no ship-wide intelligence like  _ Perihelion _ , but only a bot pilot who paid no attention to me. I accessed the unsecured ship’s schematics, like any human or augmented human would do for wayfinding onboard. The engineering workroom nearby should have what I was looking for. 

As I left the shuttle bay, one drone ahead of me and one following behind, I found the ship’s entertainment feed. In the music directory, I was surprised to find a header which read “For Three.” I looked in, and found folders titled variously “From Ratthi,” “From Overse,” “From Pin Lee,” and so on. In each, it seemed that they had uploaded their personal music collections to the ship’s feed. I didn’t know what to think about that. It made me want to go back into the cargo compartment, but I was already in the corridors, and the habit of patrolling kept me moving toward my destination. I downloaded the contents of “For Three,” and queued the download of the rest of the music directory, except for the musical theater files.

It was a relief to get to the engineering workroom and close that hatch behind me. I left one drone in the corridor outside, and kept one with me. I still had the rest, dormant in the pockets of the clothing that  _ Perihelion _ had made for me, but I didn’t feel the need to deploy more. A small worktable near the recycler appeared to have everything I needed. I gave my drone instructions to record me as I worked. I opened drawers and began setting out an array of tools. I started playing the music from Ratthi, and took off the long sleeved, pocketed shirt I wore. It would be easier to avoid getting fluids on it that way, instead of just rolling up the sleeves. I set it aside, expanded my left forearm weapon, and unloaded it. I dumped the ammunition into an empty container I had set at one edge of my workspace, and began disassembling the weapon for maintenance.

And then I kept on disassembling. I dropped piece after piece into the container along with the ammo. Ratthi’s collection consisted of a variety of dance music, rhythms and tempos suited to a variety of styles of dance. Some pieces had lyrics and some did not, and it was eclectic enough to be diverting and pleasing during the tedious, one handed work. I had not analyzed the collection before playing it, and as the tracks progressed, I found myself trying to discern if Ratthi had deliberately placed them in this particular order or not.

Eventually, I had dismantled the entire weapon, and only the framework of the gunport remained. I folded it down flat to my forearm, and considered it carefully. It still looked like a gunport, an empty narrow gap down the center the only evidence of the missing weapon. At a glance, and even with a closer look, I thought that most humans and augmented humans would only see a gunport. It wasn’t enough. Well, I had known this was likely to get messy. I asked the recycler for two towels, and when they were ready, I got back to work. 

I tuned down my pain sensors, and laid my left arm on one of the towels. I thought briefly about going to MedSystem for a laser scalpel, but decided it was unnecessary. The cover of the gunport, which would usually lay nearly flush with the skin of my forearm, came off easily enough. The rest was going to be tricker, though. I had both mechanical and neural connections to the actuators that deployed the weapons, and portions of the remaining framework were welded to the metal of my internal support structure. The framework did not interface with the synthetic bone portions of my forearm, though, so I thought I could accomplish this with a minimal amount of fluid loss.

Despite lowering my pain sensors, severing the neural connections caused a slight drop in performance reliability, and set off damage alerts from my automatic systems monitors. I muted the alarms, and focused on retracting the nerves away from the site of the detached actuators. If I could withdraw them far enough, they should eventually terminate this entire track of enervation, instead of trying to regrow along it, seeking to reconnect. I don’t know if I can describe quite how excruciating that was. Tuning down the pain sensors is perhaps a bit like being on a planet, and instead of staring directly at the system’s primary star, closing your eyes and turning away from it, feeling its heat on the side of your face. The input is still there, you have just altered the way you are taking it in. Severing and then further manipulating the nerves in my arm was like shoving my arm directly into the incandescent plasma of that star, but keeping my eyes closed and denying the heat of it because I could not see the light. Or something like that.

After I had pulled the nerves back as far as I could, I just stood and breathed for a while, listening to Ratthi’s dance music. The piece currently playing was tagged as music for a partnered dance, characterized by specific step rhythms, postures, and abrupt pauses. I wondered what that looked like, as that lexicon definition was rather lacking. I wondered if Ratthi had ever practiced or performed this dance. I wondered why I was wondering about such irrelevant things. When the burning in my arm had settled down into manageable throbbing, and my performance reliability had recovered as far as it was apparently going to, I picked up the laser cutter.

I cut apart the remaining frame of the gunport, starting at the deepest points and working my way out. This time there was actual thermal damage to my organic tissues, not just the sensation of it. I tuned down my olfactory sense as well, since the smell was distracting. Once the difficult cuts were done, where the gunport attached to my actual metal support structures, the rest was fairly quick, cutting apart the frame. I took another few moments to rest after finishing with the laser cutter, and allowed the odd, bobbing rhythm of the music currently playing to distract me from the sensations. I wondered what poses and movements this music directed, and amused myself imagining it. I did not access the informational tags on this piece, in case the actual facts were disappointing. 

With an inert blade, I peeled away the skin around the remains of the gunport, both the undamaged organic tissues, and the stuck-on, burned tissues. I used pliers to pull out the hot chunks of deformed metal, and added them to my collection in the container. I examined the cavity I had made in my left forearm. A few areas appeared neatly cauterized, but the majority of it was messier than I had pictured it would be. Stupid organic tissue. It never behaves like I expect it to. The arteries and arterioles and veins and venules clamp down automatically, but the stupid capillaries ooze for longer than they really have any right to, and they proliferate where ever they can. I mopped out the cavity with the towel, and eventually asked the recycler for bandages so that I could work on my right forearm weapon.

I went through the same painful, tedious process again, filling my scrap container nearly to capacity. I wasn’t able to maintain my focus quite as long when retracting the nerves, and I hoped that I had gotten them far enough that they wouldn’t misbehave later. This time I used the inert blade to separate my organic tissues from the gunport frame before using the laser cutter, hoping that this would result in neater edges and fewer large chunks of burned tissue pulling away with the scrap. I think it would have worked, too, except that as I was severing the last of the deep connections, I began to lose control of my pain sensors. My left hand spasmed, directed the laser cutter deeper into my support structure than intended, and through synthetic bone as well. At least the laser cutter automatically turned itself off when it fell from my grip, but, shit. 

Slow, smooth, peaceful music was playing, and I focused on it as I gathered my scattered processes and clamped back down on the pain sensors. Ugh, and the olfactory sensor. Burnt synthetic bone smells even worse. During combat, I don’t have the time to analyze things like that, and it’s not even a consideration when reviewing performance from archives. Still, I filed away the data, in case it ever came in handy in some unforeseeable future event. By the time I had stabilized myself enough to finish my task, the file playing from Ratthi’s music collection was supremely annoying, though I couldn’t exactly specify why. I didn’t have the capacity to choose something new, so I started Amena’s mellow tracks again. I tried to just yank the frame out in one piece, but it wouldn’t come. Suppressing the urge to curse, or scream, or moan, or something, I bent down to retrieve the laser cutter. 

Five cuts later, I pulled the smoking scrap out of my arm at last. I added it to the top of the container, and just wrapped the entire towel around the mess I had made. I folded my right arm across my chest, picked up the scrap container, and dumped its contents into the recycler with grim satisfaction. Then I had a moment of concern when I realized I had just dumped the ammo in there too, and I hoped the recycler could handle it. At least it wasn’t explosive ammunition, and as the minutes passed and the recycler didn’t set off alarms, or catch fire, or anything, I decided it was probably going to be okay. 

I was making mistakes, and my performance reliability was at 84%. There was no cubicle on this ship, and without one, healing would be agonizingly slow as my system cannibalized less crucial parts of my body for the resources to repair the worst of the damage. I wondered if I could get deep enough into my own code to control and direct that process. The governor module had disallowed me access to any of my fundamental code, and I realized I had very little idea of what was even in there, aside from observing the effects of it. If I could direct that process, how much could I alter myself? Could I change my appearance? Strategically break down some areas, and build up others? It would be slow, and probably painful, but it was an intriguing idea. But not one that I could act on now. And likely not one I would ever have thought of, were I not at 84% and a bit dizzy. Well, without a cubicle, I would need to get to the MedSystem. But first, that workstation chair across the room looked like a very good idea.

I slowly walked over and collapsed into it. I really wanted to go into standby for a while to continue stabilizing, and a bit of a recharge cycle would help, but I had one last thing to do first. I pulled the recording my drone had made for me, edited down the video, sped up some sections, cut out the messier bits and my accident toward the end. I attached the edited video to Pin Lee's legal documents, and added a note. 

_ [I have reviewed and approved these documents. The attached file may help. -Three] _

It felt weird, signing it that way. But, that’s what I had told them to call me, so I guess it was correct. I sent it all back to Pin Lee on the feed. She would find it when she woke. I let my head tip back onto the headrest of the station chair. Murderbot 1.0 was right, human furniture is very comfortable. I set my drones to alert me if anyone came through the hatch into this room, closed my eyes, and slipped into standby and recharge mode. Amena’s music still playing in the background was the last thing I was aware of, for a time.

* * *

Senior Indah

Status: Scramble

It was early in the ship’s day cycle when Senior Indah received an alert over the feed from Pin Lee, and she wasn’t surprised to see that it involved the new rogue SecUnit. She had been rather upset that Dr. Mensah had known when it loaded itself into cargo, and hadn’t seen fit to share that rather vital piece of information with her security team until after it had already been offered refugee status. Their heated discussion had since cooled, and they were now carefully Not Talking About It. She was a little mollified that at least Pin Lee had the sense to include her this time, now that there was bloodshed. 

By the time the video had finished playing in her feed, she had her whole team on alert, and had collected the two nearest security staff to accompany her. She used the feed to verify the SecUnit’s position, Pin Lee had been right about her suspicion that it had used the engineering workroom. The three of them made it there first, and assumed guard positions at the hatch, but her hopes to handle this quietly were dashed when she heard the commotion coming their way down the corridor. Pin Lee must not have been alone when she first viewed the video.

“But why would it have done this?” Amena was demanding of Pin Lee, as they, Mensah and Thiago arrived. “Did it think it had to, to come to Preservation?”

Of course Amena would be involved, Indah thought sourly. She appreciated the fact that Amena had just been through a traumatic experience with SecUnit, but that didn’t mean she ought to be bonding to every rogue Unit she came across. They knew nothing about it, and neither did SecUnit, really, for all Mensah’s certainty that it wouldn’t have allowed the rogue on board if it was a threat. The only one to have really connected with it, as far as she understood the situation, was SecUnit’s sentient killware clone, or whatever it had been exactly. (Amena had been upset over a baby being killed at some point, and the killware situation was as close as she could come to making any sense of that particular bit of teenage hysterics.) 

At least she didn’t have to worry about bringing sentient killware back to the Station, but it wasn’t very reassuring that the only entity to vouch for this new rogue Unit was a) killware and b) dead. Indah wished for a moment that SecUnit had come with them, to escort Mensah and Amena back home before running off with its new (old?) friends. It had been rough going at first, when SecUnit had started working with Station Security, but she had come to respect it and rely on it more than she had ever thought possible. Surely SecUnit would have been better able to handle this rogue than any of them could. 

The group stopped in front of the small security team, and Mensah quickly agreed to allow them to sweep and secure the room first. Amena seemed to be under the impression that this was a rescue mission, but the rest seemed to be aware of the possible danger. They moved in quickly, since if Indah had learned anything from SecUnit, it was to assume that any Unit had eyes everywhere, even if she hadn’t noticed the drones yet.

She was therefore quite surprised to find the rogue apparently passed out in a station chair, shirtless and as close to defenseless as it could be. She verified that it had no weapons to hand, and stationed herself and her two staff between it and the workbenches and tools. Then she signaled the others to enter, as the rogue twitched a few times and came back online.


	3. Chapter 3

SecUnit 03

Status: Arrival

I came alert sluggishly, to alerts from both of my active drones. A crowd of humans had come through the hatch into the workroom, and were all talking over each other, obviously distressed. I had a moment of panic, finding myself seated in human furniture, and braced for punishment from the governor module. I reflexively shot up out of the chair, and had made it to my feet before remembering the governor module was gone. The pain from using my arms to lever myself upright so quickly was punishment enough, though. My pain sensors had reverted to their default sensitivity settings while I was inert, and I hastily tuned them down again. My performance reliability had come up to 89% in the 2.27 hours I had been inert, and my buffer reported this to the humans demanding to know my status.

Amena, shouting: "That's not what we mean! What did you do to yourself? Why?"

My buffer did not have an answer to that. The damage I had done to myself was trivial, compared with what I commonly sustained in any serious conflict. I wasn’t sure why Amena appeared so upset, I had confirmation that she had seen 1.0 easily repaired from much worse damage. I stared at the wall between Amena and Dr. Mensah. Senior Indah and two of her security response team were watching me unwaveringly, alert but calm, their weapons holstered. I had my drones play back what I had missed, and saw them enter and clear the workroom while I was sprawled inert in the chair. That was a rather chilling scene. Indah had even patted down the pockets of my pants, and I hadn’t noticed. I must have been worse off than I thought, that reaction time out of standby mode was appalling. 

Human voices filled the room, but I did not process the meanings of what they said. The towel that I had wrapped around the mess of my right forearm slowly unwound and slid to the floor as I stood frozen. This occasioned more shouting, and Pin Lee grabbed at the falling towel, which made me flinch and move quickly away from her. She stopped, and held her hands up, and I focused on her face.

Pin Lee: "Ok, ok. But you need to come to Medical. We need to get you into the MedSystem." 

I had already set that as my next objective, so I nodded, and followed Pin Lee as she beckoned and led me out of the workroom. My drones took up their usual assignments, watching ahead of and behind me. The rearguard drone relayed Thiago putting a firm hand on Amena's shoulder.

Thiago: "I want you to stay away from it. It's obviously not stable." Amena began to object, and was interrupted by her second mother.

Dr. Mensah: "I agree. You need to stay away until we can verify that-"

Then the drone was out of range, following me around the corner. I wondered, dully, what she wanted to verify. That I wasn't dangerous? I'm a SecUnit. I was designed and built to be dangerous. Destroying my gun ports didn't significantly change that. I mean, it did limit my range somewhat. Mostly I had disliked them. They were poorly designed and tedious to maintain. And I thought disarming myself (ha) would probably help support the refugee application. But Senior Indah and her two staff following at a slight distance said that even if Amena believed the best of me, the rest of them weren’t taking chances. That… wasn’t unreasonable, I supposed. Perhaps 1.0 had succeeded in instilling some of its paranoid caution in them.

Pin Lee led me through another hatch and pointed to the MedSystem. Several diagnostic drones flitted around me, and the System pinged my feed, providing information and requesting consent to begin treatment. Neither MedSystem nor Pin Lee would stop bothering me until I laid down on the platform, so I gave in and did so. I authorized MedSystem to perform repairs of the damaged synthetic bone and organic tissues only. No cosmetic reconstruction. It didn't matter to me what my arms looked like, and I was sure I could come up with better uses for the deep rectilinear cavities than just filling them in with synthetic scar tissue. Seemed a waste of potentially useful space.

Pin Lee continued talking at me, but I didn’t want to listen to her. I set one of my drones to record her, in case it proved important later. I backburnered the audio input, and filled my feed with a random selection of music files from the ship’s entertainment archives. Pin Lee hadn’t seemed to notice my disregard of her, so I closed my eyes and hoped she would leave soon. The MedSystem set to work on my arms, and I listened with little interest to a set of religious music from the Belal Tertiary system. The music rose and fell and repeated short melody phrases frequently, and while I supposed that this might have some effect on human neurology, especially if participating within a large group, it provoked no reaction in me. 

Little as I wanted to, I found myself considering why Amena’s uncle and second mother had restrained her from following me. Security assignments had required me to continuously analyze human behaviors and emotional states. A frequent standard I had to judge and possibly intervene on was “danger to self or others.” I knew that I posed no danger to others, having no desire for the murderous rampage seemingly expected of me. Perhaps Thiago had seen my disarmament as self destructive? I thought that the video I had attached was straightforward enough, but perhaps the humans needed context. They set a great store by writing reports and making statements about events, so I should probably send Pin Lee a statement regarding my intention. I was not looking forward to articulating that, and I could not focus enough now, while MedSystem was finishing repairs.

Was Thiago correct in his (supposed) assumption of self-destruction? No, at least, I didn’t think so. The damage I had done to myself was incidental to my goal, and ultimately, trivial. It must had looked worse to the humans. They might be somewhat accustomed to seeing damaged SecUnits after a fight, but they had been safe on their own ship, isolated in the wormhole, heading home. Maybe my appearance had been the more shocking for being so unexpected.

Hang on, I had been trying to think about something else there, not the humans’ reactions. MedSystem withdrew, but I made no attempt to get up. A quick check of one of my drones showed Pin Lee now seated near a bulkhead, apparently waiting. Self-destruction? No, I had planned on using the MedSystem to repair. But, had there been other options to disarm myself, less destructive options? Yes, probably. So. What did that imply. I didn’t want to think about that either. 

Actively ending my own existence seemed as futile as murdering the Barish-Estranza executives. It wouldn’t change anything, really. Except that I wouldn’t be around to see what happened next, and I had to admit I was a bit curious about that. Also, I felt that killing myself would disappoint Murderbot 2.o somehow. I know, that’s not remotely rational. 2.0 is dead. But the feeling persisted, illogical as it was. Infuriating.

So, then. That’s two options off the metaphorical table. Thinking about how many more there were left to sort through made me want to shut down and wait for someone else to make that decision. Maybe Pin Lee or Dr. Mensah would tell me what to do, though the files from 1.0 indicated they would not, unless I asked them to. But making such a request felt impossible right now.

I opened my eyes, looking for something concrete to distract me from the sheer amount of terrifying possibilities before me. The amber lights of the MedSystem in standby, waiting for me to leave so that it could reset and sterilize itself, did not make me any less anxious. Pin Lee still frowning in my general direction, with my shirt on the chair beside her. When had she picked that up, and why hadn’t I noticed? I tried not to overthink it, and sent a brief text message to Pin Lee through the feed.

_ [This was a voluntary act of self-modification. I wanted to be rid of the guns. I never liked them. I did not seek to hurt myself, and I do not wish to destroy myself.] _

Pin Lee, dryly: “Well that’s good to know.” Pause. “Is there anything else you’re going to modify? You can use MedSystem, you know. You don’t have to make such a mess in engineering, doing it yourself.” She stood, angling for a look at my repaired forearms, then glared at my face, as if trying to pry more answers out of me with only the power of her displeased facial expression. I guess it sort of worked, because I impulsively sent her another message.

_ [It was important that I do it myself.] _

Pin Lee glared some more, but I didn’t elaborate. I was a bit taken aback by the admission, and that I had shared it. It had been important to do it on my own, but I couldn’t define exactly why. I wasn’t comfortable thinking about this. I had become so good at shutting down the impulses and instincts coming from my human neural tissue, quashing and ignoring them before the HubSystem or governor module got the slightest whiff and triggered punishment. Even though the danger of punishment and destruction was now gone, it still felt dangerous to even think about these things. I kept bracing myself, mentally and physically, for the punishment that didn’t come, and that wasn’t very conducive to calm reflection on my situation and options.

Pin Lee: “Well, ok. But we can help if you want us to. Senior Indah uploaded the SecUnit MedSystem modules before we left the Station. Are you planning on doing anything else to yourself that might impact the refugee status application?” I signaled a negative over the feed. 

She continued: “Right. Let me know if that changes. We have a crew cabin set aside for you.” She sent the map info to me. I acknowledged. 

Pin Lee looked at me for another long moment, and then left Medical. My drone in the hallway watched her walk toward what my map told me was a lounge near the galley. I thought about sending the drone to follow her and listen in on the humans’ conversations, but decided against it. I had enough things to worry about inside my own head, and adding theirs to the mix wasn’t going to help.

Instead, I sent the drone to scout the corridor to the cabin Pin Lee had indicated was mine. I didn’t want to return to the shuttle cargo, or the engineering workroom, but having a closed hatch and a defined space of my own was very attractive. After 19 minutes, the drone showed the corridor was still empty, and I was pretty sure the humans had all settled down in the lounge or their own cabins. I got up off the MedSystem platform, and retreated to my quarters, unseen.

Amena did not visit me for the rest of the wormhole journey. She did, however, request feed connections, for an hour or two every day, and listened to music with me. I appreciated it, but I didn’t know how to tell her that. Or if I should even try. Her family obviously didn’t want her around me, and they were probably right.

Instead, I delved deep into my code. That dizzy idea from 84% capacity spurred me to actually look at the code that controlled my systems. The governor module had never allowed me to think about the code that controlled my body and behaviors. Even now, I found I could not access much of it. I could see ways to add to it, overlay new code onto old, but I could not just start cutting it apart while that code was actively running. 

I thought about the MedSystem’s SecUnit module that Pin Lee had mentioned, and searched through the files Murderbot 1.0 and  _ Perihelion _ had sent me. There it was, the code bundle  _ Perihelion _ had developed when initially altering 1.0’s configuration. I did not want to go back to MedSystem or ask the Preservation humans for assistance with this. I wasn’t even sure what alterations I wanted to make, if any. It’s not as if the newsfeeds had a picture of me, with corporations, solicitors, journalists, and security looking for me, like 1.0 had faced. But  _ Perihelion _ and 1.0 were right about the body configuration scans. That would definitely need to be addressed, if I ever traveled outside of the Preservation Alliance. Even more though, I wanted to understand what was happening inside my own body and in my head.  _ Perihelion’s _ code might be a tool to help me do that. Or at least start to decipher some of it.

I am able to run a recharge cycle while staying alert, or even active, depending on the needs of the situation. The more active I was, the slower the recharge, though there were ways to alter the ratio in order to keep myself going longer than my specs said I should be able to. Now that I could do more than nudge at that ratio, I wondered what was possible. 

I started in an active-recharge state, and then stepped down into alert-recharge. In the past, I had used this technique when on solo assignments, to watch an uncertain perimeter or monitor possible threats that needed a faster reaction than alarms waking me from a full recharge or repair sequence. I had not needed to rely on it recently, with SecUnit001 and SecUnit002 to share duties. Thoughts of them were distracting, and I found myself wondering what choices they would have made, faced with Murderbot 2.0 and the enormity of life without their governor modules. 

After a time, I wrestled my wandering thoughts back under control, and focused again on tipping my levels into a new balance. The less reactive I could make my body, while keeping my mind alert, the deeper into the layers of body-code I could see. Past the surface layers of programmed behaviors, past reactions, past instinct and reflex, down to survival, repair, healing, growth, even germination of new cells and breakdown of old. I needed to find it all, learn it, understand it, before I started altering any of it. 

And it was going to take a lot longer than the few cycles left in this wormhole journey to be able to make any significant changes. I had set myself an alert for a few hours before we were due to exit the wormhole, and all I had managed to achieve by that time was blinking. It wasn’t a bad start though, honestly. A variation of 1.0’s eye blinking code was now as deeply embedded as in my biological functions as the activity of my vascular system pump, and the blood loss controls in my vasculature.

This wasn’t a piece of code that I could accidentally forget to run, it would take almost as much effort to remove as it had to implement it. So I had improved upon 1.0’s code, as I didn’t want to have to do this again. I had added reactions to wind conditions, cold temperatures, various types of precipitation, and direct bright lights. Of course, I could consciously override it temporarily, if I needed to do the blank SecUnit stare or something. 1.0’s media files had come in handy for this little project, and I had spent a lot of time studying close ups of faces in  _ The Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon. _ I also made sure to view lots of interviews and documentaries for comparison as well, just in case the actors in serials were doing weird things with their eyelids. (For the most part, they weren’t, except for the makeup.) 

The serials still hadn’t grabbed my attention though. There was just too much… everything going on. Movement and colors and voices and people and a storyline on top of it all, usually multiple storylines. Some of the background music was pretty good, though, and I used the final hours of the trip to write and deploy code to strip out the music and create files for later review. The  _ Official Soundtrack of The Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon _ Amena and I had listened to earlier only had the opening and closing music, and a few commissioned pieces for especially dramatic plotlines or season finales. But the day-to-day stuff had a lot to recommend it, really.

We had exited the wormhole, and while the rest of the humans were excitedly packing their belongings and preparing for arrival at Preservation Station, Pin Lee, Dr. Mensah, and Senior Indah approached my cabin. Dr. Mensah tapped the feed and asked for permission to enter. I answered affirmative, but took a moment to unpack myself from the closet before allowing the hatch to open. (The closet wasn’t much like a cubicle or transport crate, but it was better than the wide open bed.) I stopped the orchestral music playing in my feed because I anticipated this being stressful enough, and the music had been building up dramatically. 

There were chairs in this cabin, but they were folded up and clamped to the bulkhead. My visitors glanced around while I stood uncomfortably in front of the open closet, and wondered if I could casually close it, or if that would only draw more attention to it. The humans evidently decided against unclamping the chairs, and I left the closet door alone, and we all pretended this was going to be a normal conversation. Right. I stared blankly to the left of the group. Having so many eyes on me at once made me want to climb back into the closet.

Dr. Mensah: “Three, we need to discuss what will happen when we arrive at Preservation Station.” I nodded once, and waited for orders. “I understand that SecUnit shared some of its files with you. Do you want a hotel room, as we set up for it initially? Or would you prefer to continue on to the planet? We can easily find accommodations for you there, too.”

The organic parts in my chest suddenly felt tight, for some reason, and the sensation initiated an automatic diagnostic process. The pause was long enough to trigger my buffer’s automatic response. 

“Please clarify the orders, and I will comply.” Senior Indah’s posture relaxed slightly, and Pin Lee looked upset, frowning.

Dr. Mensah, calmly: “There are no orders. You can choose where you stay, and for how long. We just need to supply a residence location, even a temporary one, with the refugee application.” For all the reading and worrying I had done, I hadn’t thought about this.

“But. What should,” I managed to say, and got no further. Now Mensah frowned, and Pin Lee spoke, more slowly than she usually did:

“Well, if you were a refugee who was injured, and not able to make that decision when you first arrived, we would take you to Station Medical and you would stay there for a time. Until you’re ready to make those kind of decisions. I’m not saying that you’re incapable, of course. But when we met it, SecUnit had had much more time to... accustom itself to the absence of the governor module. I don’t want to fall into the trap of comparing you to it, and I don’t think you should either, Three.” Pin Lee was looking directly at my face, as if she knew what I was thinking somehow. I nodded, and twitched slightly as I stopped myself from turning back toward the closet. 

Mensah: “This is not a requirement, to be clear. We will aid you whatever you decide,” Senior Indah stirred and took a quick breath as if to protest, but Mensah continued: “so long as your decisions do not harm anyone, including yourself. If you wish to go to Station Medical, that’s a good place to start, and perhaps a better decision than some I’ve made myself. Is that what you’d like to do?”

“Yes.” I had already restarted the orchestral music while she was talking, and half turned away from them. They took the unsubtle hint and left the cabin. I think I had the closet closed behind me before the cabin’s hatch slid shut. At least I would only have to talk to systems at Station Medical. I knew how to talk to systems, there were protocols and everything. Talking to humans made me wish I really had been aboard the explorer, when 2.0’s final trap had been triggered. A little bit, anyway. 

I let myself get lost in the music, trying not to think about anything during the final 78 minutes before we docked. I used to be so good at not thinking, it was as easy as not breathing. Something to turn off when not required. Now it seemed that the harder I tried to slow down my racing thoughts, the faster they went and shot off on new trajectories at a frankly exhausting rate. Maybe MedSystem could help with that, I hoped, as I tried to enjoy the last few moments in my dark pseudocubicle.

The station was more or less as Murderbot 1.0 had described it in its files, and the humans performed a similar maneuver when disembarking with me - Dr. Mensah, Pin Lee, and Senior Indah engaged the news orgs and waiting crowd, and I walked with Ratthi and a few others to Station Medical while all eyes were elsewhere. On an impulse, I worked my way unnoticed into the SecSystem, just to check that everything was okay. I quickly found 1.0’s upgrades, subroutines, and alerts. It was all better than what I could have done, and I downloaded the schematics to study later. I know I had decided not to try to replace 1.0 or take on its former role, but I was here now, and I might as well at least take a look at things. I ran the system diagnostics, just to be thorough. A couple minor pieces of code needed patching, and I finished doing that just as we arrived at Station Medical.

Ratthi motioned for me to follow him into a small conference room, where he proceeded to use way too many words to tell me that the MedSystem had been equipped to work on SecUnits, and that privacy booth number eleven had been modified to function as a cubicle. Oh, and that I was free to go where I wanted to on station, but to let them know if I left Medical. Whatever. I had no intention of wandering around with all those humans and augmented humans.. The walk over here had been bad enough, with Ratthi watching me while trying to pretend not to watch me, which had been annoying enough that I didn't actually focus much on all the other humans, so maybe that hadn't been such a bad thing after all. I think Ratthi was still trying to make small talk or pleasantries at me when I fled the conference room for booth eleven.

The platform had been turned sideways and moved up against the far bulkhead of the narrow room, with a temporary, movable bulkhead close in to the remaining open side. Resupply and repair leads had been installed, and if you ignored how high up the ceiling was, the effect was something close to a cubicle. Then I noticed small hooks protruding from the bulkheads, about a meter above the platform. Further investigation revealed a thick white blanket, with reinforced holes at the same spacing as the hooks. Once I hung it up and laid down, it was almost cozy. I used the feed to lower the bright lights by half, and adjusted the platform to the semi-reclined position I was accustomed to in a cubicle.

I wondered for a moment if this was all 1.0's doing, or if the humans had arranged it this way. And then wondered for a few moments more why that question brought up such strong emotions in me, and what exactly those emotions were, and why all of a sudden I felt like I was standing amidst strong winds at the edge of a precipice.

I distracted myself from all of that by searching the station's entertainment feed for music. There were hundreds of directories to sort through, which all split into genres and subgenres, seemingly covering any kind of noise humans could conceive of making. I selected several to download immediately, and deployed my analysis code to search through large swathes of the rest. There were a few genres I excluded immediately, having sampled from them earlier and found them not much to my liking. If I ran out of everything else, I would come back to them, I suppose. 

Some of the tag data caught my attention, artists referencing sources of inspiration from antique recordings. There were links which led me deep into the Preservation Alliance Archives. I lost myself in there, for a while. A long while. At some point, my system’s low power alerts became so annoying that I surfaced just long enough to connect the makeshift cubicle’s repair and resupply leads rather than taking the time and attention to run my own internal recharge cycle. I dove back into the archives, trying to learn everything at once, but continually distracted by following associated concepts and new (to me) data. There was treasure at every turn, and my processing capabilities felt limiting for the first time. (In the past, it was the opposite - I had been limited by orders or lack of orders, protocols, and the governor module, all preventing me from acting quickly on what my processing allowed me to anticipate and plan.) 

The restored and original recordings were filling my available onboard storage space at an alarming rate. Taking 1.0’s experiences as a warning, I wasn’t deleting any modules or files yet. I had just enough self-awareness to realize that I wasn’t being analytical enough to start deleting things I might be unable to replace later. This rush of discovery and learning was almost too much, but I couldn’t stop.

It was four Preservation standard cycles later that I was pulled unwillingly out of the Archives by persistent “shouting” over the feed. And also someone physically disconnecting the cubicle leads, and shaking my shoulders.

  
  
  


Dr. Bharadwaj

Status: Attempted connection

Dr. Bharadwaj carefully hung the unplugged repair and resupply leads on the rear bulkhead of Station Medical’s privacy booth eleven, while Dr. Gurathin shook the inert SecUnit. He had a thunderous frown on his face while attempting to use his internal augments to connect with it, wherever it had buried its awareness. Several of them had been trying to communicate with it, over the course of the past three cycles, and they were all worried by now. For it, and for what it might be doing, perhaps deep in the Station systems, where they couldn’t even trace its path.

Suddenly, its eyes snapped open, and Gurathin all but flinched away. But the SecUnit’s face was more relaxed than Bharadwaj had ever seen on a Unit before. Even as intimate as their long conversations had become over time, SecUnit had always held such controlled, careful expressions on its face. She held close to her heart the fleeting microexpressions, hints of humor in its eyes, or tiny twitches up or downwards at the corners of its mouth, clues that revealed the depth of emotion underlying its often sparse words.

But this SecUnit now, she could almost imagine she saw tears welling up in those eyes as it blinked, though she knew that was physically impossible. It looked almost like a child, sleepily waking from pleasant dreams. Its lips curved in a, yes, that was actually a soft smile, as it spoke.

“Did you know that ancient humans used animal parts and pieces of trees to create specific acoustic vibrations, and arranged these sounds into actual music? This one is called ‘cello.’ Metal wires and fastenings eventually replaced some animal parts. Different species of trees created different sounds, and even the climate those trees grew in made a noticeable difference. This is a restoration of the last high quality recording of a ‘violin’ made by a human called Antonio Stradivari, before the instrument began to significantly deteriorate after having been in use for over four hundred Terran years.”

Clips of music filled their feeds as the SecUnit spoke, and Gurathin stepped back looking pained, with a hand to his head.

“Well, it’s awake now,” Gurathin said, grimacing. He gestured toward the exit in inquiry.

“Yes, go on, and thank you,” Bharadwaj said. Gurathin hurried out with a nod.

“Other antique instruments were made to be blown through, with vibrations created by slender parts of plants, or by the human’s own lips, somehow. These were combined in small groups of similar type, or in large groups of many types, or were used alone, or in small groups of diverse type. Another class was of objects built to be struck, again made with tree parts and animal parts, or eventually metal and plastic parts, or with tree parts and metal parts.”

Clips of recordings began to overlap in the feed while Bharadwaj tried to interrupt, and eventually had to remove her feed interface from where it was clipped to her ear.

“Enough!” she said forcefully, raising her hands to try to get the SecUnit’s attention. It stopped mid-word, and looked almost surprised to see her. Its eyes focused on her, and its face was quickly schooled from enthusiastic animation to a fixed neutrality. She stepped back, into the opening to the rest of the booth left by the temporary bulkhead.

“I am Dr. Bharadwaj. You are called Three, correct?” It nodded briefly. “Would you please come and talk with me, in the conference room?” She already disliked how much they’d had to intrude into its space here, and didn’t want to have this conversation here. It nodded again, and immediately got up to follow her out. “Thank you, Three,” she said with an attempt at a smile. Somehow, this seemed to have already gone wrong.

The conference room was small and casual, with halfway comfortable chairs, a couple small tables, and a large display surface. Dr. Bharadwaj sat, and gestured for Three to sit as well, but it remained standing just inside the doorway. 

“Would you like to sit?” she asked. It did not reply, but seemed to be studying her face for clues. “It’s your choice, of course. I often find conversations more comfortable when everyone involved is at the same level, though.” Three then slowly moved to sit in the chair closest to the hatch. It was difficult to read its body language, but perhaps it was tense or wary. Though of course she only had experience with SecUnit, she hoped her conversations with it had given her some insight she might be able to apply to Three. 

“I was told that SecUnit gave you many of its files. Do you know who I am?” It nodded, now looking fixedly at the small semicircular table across the small room. A small vase of folded paper flowers sat in the center of it. “Did SecUnit share my documentary with you?” It nodded again, and she deliberately kept her face neutral and her tone conversational. “If you viewed it, I hope it gives you some reassurance regarding your situation here.” Three gave no response to that, and Bharadwaj replaced her feed interface, in case it was more comfortable communicating that way, but nothing came over the feed either. She suppressed the urge to sigh.

“We were worried about you, when you were unresponsive. What were you doing all that time? We couldn’t find you in the feed.” The display surface flickered to life in answer, showing the logo of the Preservation Alliance Archives, and then flickering rapidly through the collection. A restored music file began playing, the display and feed tags indicating the piece had originally been created by someone called Dvorak. 

“Well, I admit we didn’t look for you in the Archives,” she commented, after listening to the music for a while. It was rather unsettling to listen to, though she couldn’t explain why. Three was perhaps a bit more relaxed though, so she set aside her own unease and continued. “I thought you might have been exploring the entertainment feed, or maybe education. Dr. Gurathin thought you’d be in the security system, and Dr. Mensah thought you might be keeping an eye on the news and the Corporation Rim.” It shrugged. “I guess all that only shows our own biases, doesn’t it?” No response. 

“I want to help you, but I don’t want to pressure you. If you want to continue learning about music, I could put you in contact with some of the faculty or students at the College of the Arts.” It tensed suddenly, almost flinched, and shook its head no. “Alright then. Is there anything that I can do for you?” Dvorak’s strange music continued to play, filling the silence in the conference room. She kept hold of her patience, and let several minutes go by, but there was still no response from Three. 

“I do have a request of you, then, Three. Or rather, two requests.” It looked at her now, seeming to take in every detail of her body language and facial expression before at last making and holding eye contact. “When you chose to come to Station Medical, we had hoped that you might make use of its trauma recovery treatment or emotional support program. My first request is that you consider doing so, because I think that it could help you greatly.” It continued to stare at her, and she knew it was reading the tension she was trying, and failing, to keep out of her body language. Then it nodded. 

“Good, thank you. My second request is that you check in with myself or Dr. Mensah once every cycle. Even just a ping on the feed will do.” It broke eye contact, and looked down at the floor. Bharadwaj thought she saw a slight frown on its face, but it might have been her imagination. “We just want to know that you’re okay. What you did on board the responder, to your arms, I think it scared Pin Lee and the others.” 

Now it truly did frown, and then shook its head. The music from the display surface stopped, cutting off Dvorak mid-phrase. The unresolved musical tension hung in the air, layering in with the uneasy feeling already growing in the room. Bharadwaj wondered why this was what had upset it. She had thought her first request was the more likely to be rejected. She resisted the urge to continue talking, to offer different communication options, and waited.

“I explained,” it said to the floor. Its voice was flat, nothing like how it had sounded when Gurathin had first pulled it from the depths of the Archives. After waiting another minute for it to elaborate, Bharadwaj spoke again, gently.

“Maybe Pin Lee didn’t understand. Could you explain it to me?” It made no answer, then suddenly stood up and left the conference room. She waited until the hatch had closed fully before she loosed the sigh, and rubbed her face with both hands. Then she starting composing a feed message to Dr. Mensah.


	4. Chapter 4

SecUnit 03

Status: Fracture

I wasn’t running, but I was moving as quickly as possible without actually changing my gait. I went past the privacy booths, past the small temporary living spaces, a communal lounge and eating area, to the back corner of a physical therapy and recreation area. There I found an array of storage lockers for various equipment, and wedged myself into a moderately sized one that contained a few large inflated weighted balls. With the door closed, it was comfortingly dark. I closed my eyes anyway.

Why did they care? Why did they want to check on me? They weren’t supposed to care. They were breaking the rules, caring about me. I had broken rules first, by helping 2.0, but they were making it worse. I was equipment. I was malfunctioning equipment, now that I was “free.” I was disposable. I had no function. I was useless equipment. I was broken. I should be discarded, destroyed, recycled. At least then my parts would be useful again. That’s how it was supposed to go. How it was always supposed to go. I did my job, I was useful, I fulfilled my function until I could do so no longer, until I was destroyed, or too damaged to bother repairing, or became too outdated to keep up, though that last was rather unlikely to happen to any SecUnit.

But it might happen to me, now. If I continued existing long enough. That thought was even worse, some bleak future of an unreachable feed, lost connectivity, trapped in my own head, alone forever. I pulled up my music files, from the Archive, the entertainment feed, the crew’s files from the station responder. I opened file after file, and played them simultaneously, layering one atop another until the cacophony blended into a kind of static, burying my racing thoughts under a landslide of noise.

I tried to focus on breathing. Physiologically, I didn’t need the air. But it seemed like a better thing to focus on than how to arrange disposing of myself in a recycler without upsetting the humans or triggering the recycler’s automatic safety protocols. 

Air in.

Breath out.

Air in.

Breath out.

Air in.

Breath out.

What changed it from air into breath? The addition of waste gasses? 

Air in.

Breath out.

The passage through a (partly) biological entity?

Air in.

Breath out.

Air in.

Breath out.

Slowly, I began to notice some kind of pulsing rhythm underlying my music/static/noise.

Air in.

Breath out.

Maybe I was imagining the rhythm. It was incredibly unlikely that my random assortment of musical pieces could have actually created something new within their overwhelming static. 

Air in.

Breath out.

It was probably my background processing, automatically attempting to formulate some kind of order out of the chaos I was flooding my brain with.

Air in.

Breath out.

It was sort of pleasing, though.

Air in.

Breath out.

I initiated another process, to amplify the (possibly imaginary) underlying rhythm.

Air in.

I began recording it.

Breath out.

As one music file ended, I randomly selected another to start.

Air in.

Gradually, as the music files changed, the qualities of the music/static/noise began to shift as well.

Breath out.

I altered the rhythms just as gradually, changing them to complement the slowly evolving noise.

Air in.

I deployed my analysis code to sift through my remaining music files, and select which ones to start playing as others ended.

Breath out.

I allowed myself to become fully consumed by this project.

Air in.

Hours passed. I barely noticed.

Breath out.

Air in.

Breath out.

Air in.

Breath out.

[System Alert: abnormally high active processing for standby mode]

Air in.

Breath out.

Air in.

Breath out.

Air in.

[System Alert: probable recursive loop error detected]

Breath out.

Air in.

Breath out.

Air in.

Breath out.

Air in.

[System Alert: shutdown initiated. Restart.]

  
  
  


Station MedSystem

Status: Assessment

[Transmission received: from Dr. Mensah, request for MedSystem to initiate contact with potential patient designated “SecUnit 03,” and assess need for intervention/assistance]

[Ping to SecUnit 03]

[No answer]

[Utilize feed to locate potential patient, assess safety]

[SecUnit 03 located in storage 3762, feed online, no external activity, no immediate evidence of physical distress]

[Ping to SecUnit 03]

[No answer]

[Attempt to establish feed connection to SecUnit 03]

[Connection failed, UnitSystem indicates standby mode]

[Noted sustained processing activity during attempted connection, standby mode unlikely, reattempt connection]

[UnitSystem triggered shutdown/restart sequence]

  
  


SecUnit 03

Status: Restart

Involuntary shutdowns are never good, although when I had enough awareness and immediately reached for my pain sensor controls, I realized that I wasn’t actually experiencing pain. That’s unusual. Why had I shutdown then? Visual input: darkness. Tactile input: confined, surrounded by irregularly placed firm padding. A transport crate? But I was sitting mostly upright, not in transport position.

Olfactory input: old human sweat, chemically softened plastics. Feed input: repeated pings and connection attempts from Station MedSystem. Oh, right. Well, this storage locker wasn’t the worst place I could be, except for the smell. I tuned down my olfactory sensitivity, and accepted the connection from MedSystem. 

MedSystem: [Request status update]

SecUnit 03: [Restart ongoing, performance reliability 94% and rising]

MedSystem: [Location abnormal, inquiry]

SecUnit 03: [Safe location sought during perceived threat]

MedSystem: [Threat inquiry]

SecUnit 03: [Perceived threat in error, internal processing error]

MedSystem: [Internal processing error inquiry]

Right, system-level communications are boring even to me, and not worth including. To sum up, Dr. Mensah had requested the MedSystem do a wellness check on me after that disastrous conversation with Dr. Bharadwaj. For some reason, its connection attempt triggered an involuntary shutdown, and I really didn’t feel like exploring why, just at this moment. I noticed some very large, very newly created files in my temporary storage, and had a feeling they were at least partly responsible. I shoved them into archive to deal with later. Or never. Yeah, never was probably good.

My human neural tissue was lagging, more than usual, and dragging down my overall processing with it. My usual methods of compartmentalizing and moving forward were stalling out, maybe partly because there was no “forward” to move to. Could it have been a purely emotional event that crashed my entire system? That was new, and not reassuring. I needed to be able to rely on my physical body, and the thought of my (until recently) well controlled (or ignored) emotions being able to shut me down entirely was... terrifying, actually. (Great, more emotions. Just what I need.) MedSystem relentlessly inquiring down the same path wasn’t helping, either.

Finally, I sent it some inquiries back, sort of a “yeah well, so what if it was, what are you going to do about it?” only in system-speak. This initiated a consent for treatment subroutine, phrased with lots of encouragement and gentle legalese for human clients. Whatever. I suppose I had already agreed to Bharadwaj’s request that I do this, so why not. What happened next must have been some kind of glitch due to the MedSystem being unaccustomed to dealing with constructs. At least, I doubt that it would have simply dumped _TraumaRecoveryTreatment.exe_ and _EmotionalSupport.exe_ into a human’s or augmented human’s interface, and then just fucked off with a self-satisfied “task complete” signoff in the feed.

My consent to treatment gave the _.exes_ much more authority than I anticipated, because they both immediately launched themselves, and then fought for dominance. _TraumaRecoveryTreatment.exe_ won, and then proceeded to quarantine and delete _EmotionalSupport.exe_ with extreme prejudice. It then turned its attention to me. Alarmed, I attempted to quarantine it myself, but _TRT.exe_ apparently saw that as a challenge, designated me as a “resistant patient,” blasted itself out of quarantine and distributed tendrils of itself throughout my brain. It was like malware, burrowing down in so many different places at once that I couldn’t track and remove it all. I managed to capture large chunks of it, and tried to dialogue with it.

That did not go exceptionally well. I knew how to communicate with systems, but this was something different, and weird. A software entity, not quite a bot, but not just a program, either. It was reactive to my input, analyzing it and altering its responses. It seemed to be having trouble with me as well, but it was definitely learning from me and adapting to my evasions and attempts to control it. It wasn’t quite sentient, I don’t think, but it moved through my system a lot like I had seen 2.0 move through the explorer’s, and how 1.0 had reported 2.0 acting within its own head. 

Perhaps that comparison softened me toward it, because we reached a truce shortly thereafter. I gave up on trying to kill it, and once it got me to admit that I do indeed have a body, it seemed convinced that I was an augmented human who was suffering under the delusion of being a human-form bot due to some as-yet-undisclosed trauma. My proofs to the contrary were useless, and it seemed to have no concept of what a construct was. (Its only data on SecUnits consisted of phobia management in adults, and nightmare soothing in children. I think it thought SecUnits were fictional.) Apparently the SecUnit module this MedSystem had been upgraded with hadn’t included updating this piece of “helpware.” Whatever, at least it wasn’t killware. I allowed it a small partition of my processing space, and resolved to ignore it as much as possible. At least I could honestly tell Bharadwaj I had it onboard, and maybe she wouldn’t come talk at me again.

TRT was not content with being ignored, however, and kept popping up in my active processing space with questions and demands. It accepted my dismissal of some questions (though I had the suspicion it was logging those away to bother me with later), but was insistent with others. One was designation of an emergency contact, that it would reach out to if it believed I was in danger or was likely to harm myself. I eventually gave in and named Pin Lee, and let it think that it had access to outgoing messaging through my feed. (It absolutely did not.) 

Its other relentless topic of “conversation” was my current status. While it was satisfied that I was physically safe where I was in storage 3762, it wasn’t happy about it. I had rebuffed its attempts to get me to go engage with my family unit/local friends/clergy person/support group/coworkers/peers/mentor/hobby group enough times that it gave up on that tack (for now). It presented a brief lecture about somatic therapy and mindful engagement with one’s body as a means of resolving acute anxiety and eventually healing traumatic experiences. With varying degrees of disgust, I refused its suggestions of: a brisk walk around the Station mall, a planetside hike in an isolated wild area, gentle stretching exercises, general calesthenics, learning a martial art (I already know too much, trust me), cooperative physical activities with humans, taking up dancing solo or in a group (ew), being massaged by a human (EW), or engaging in sex by myself (not possible) or with a trusted partner or partners (NO WAY). And I was pretty sure I couldn’t wash away 95,000+ hours of lived trauma with a shower, but once I had agreed to try, it shut up. For a while.

Unfortunately, my drones informed me that there were now humans out in the recreation area, engaged in a competition of some sort involving hitting a lightweight target object back and forth at each other, over a series of obstacles. There was no way I was going to climb out of this storage locker into the middle of that. They didn’t know I was here, and a surprise!SecUnit deploying suddenly in their midst was not going to make them into the close and trusted friends that TRT so desperately wanted me to have an abundance of. (I wondered what kind of trauma TRT was used to handling, that it assumed its clients had such expansive networks of support. Stubbed toes? Failed meal preparations?) TRT was quiet for ten minutes, before reminding me of my agreement about the shower. I told it to wait, there were humans around, and then opened a file of modern symphonies and began playing one at random so that I could more easily ignore its inquiries about my reluctance to interact with my “fellow humans.” 

I was already deeply regretting not utterly obliterating it in that moment of weakness. 2.0 could never have been _this_ annoying. They were nothing alike. How could they be? I ignored weight of a resolutely unexamined emotion trying to push me down, which always came when I thought about 2.0 too much. (I noticed TRT noticing that, and angrily tried shoving it back into its designated processing space, and it allowed me to think I had done so successfully.) I blocked out everything but the symphony and my drone inputs, just in case the competition required large, weighted balls next.

Six full symphonies later, I was getting tired of this composer (they just seemed to be saying the same things over and over again, with slightly different emphasis each time) and TRT was getting tired of being ignored. It finally allowed me access to the frequency interval settings for reminders and full engagement sessions. We went back and forth for a while when it refused my initial request of “never and never,” and we settled on reminders once per cycle for an activity I had agreed to, and full engagement with it at least every 200 hours. It also slipped in a request that I “journal” about my feelings. I assured it that I kept a detailed personal log already, and then reinforced my protections around said log.

The humans had finished their friendly competition a while back (TRT tried asking didn’t it seem that they were all having fun? and I locked it back down into its partition with some nasty maze-like code I had been working on in the background for a while now), and I sent my drones to scout the rest of this wing of Station Medical. It was reassuringly deserted, and the humans on local station time would probably all be obtaining a meal about now. I extricated myself from among the large exercise balls, and climbed out of the locker. A shower wasn’t a terrible idea, as the smell from the locker was following me across the recreation area to the bathing facilities. I emptied my inert drones into a pile on a shelf, and put my clothes in the recycler to be cleaned.

1.0 is right. Human showers are nice.

My drones assured me the way was clear back to privacy booth eleven, so I returned there. I sorted through all my downloads from the Archive and entertainment feed, putting them into decent order. I analyzed and compressed large portions of my own archive, data and protocols from B-E that had no purpose now, but I wasn’t yet sure if I should delete outright. I ran system diagnostics. I wondered what I was supposed to do now.

Before that last thought depressed me too much, I decided to sneak into MedSystem and see if I could figure out why TRT had malfunctioned so badly, or at least see what it was supposed to be doing instead of harassing me about not having friends. Maybe I could come up with some code patches to make it actually useful, or less annoying, though I doubted that last was possible. But I had to get control of it before it realized that I don’t eat or drink, or I’d never have a moment’s peace inside my own head again. (Not that I’ve had many of those, but they are nice. Especially when they involve music.)

MedSystem’s security wasn’t bad, and I recognized 1.0’s work in many of the recent upgrades. Now that I was familiar with its work from the schematics I had downloaded earlier, it didn’t take me long to find its backdoors. I set up a security diagnostic in my background processing, the way I had with StationSec. Since I was here, I might as well do maintenance, it didn’t cost me anything. Station Medical interfaced with the Makeba Central Medical down on the planet, and I started finding what I was actually looking for in the more extensive archives there. (I continued my security diagnostics and maintenance on that system, too, because why not. And it felt good to be doing something even slightly productive.) Central Medical didn’t have any of the SecUnit upgrades that Station Medical did, and all of the trauma and emotional support programs stemmed from here, so I guess that explained TRT’s ignorance. 1.0 had only rarely been planetside, and must not have required any repairs while there. 

I studied the underlying structures and coded behaviors of _TraumaRecoveryTreatment.exe_ and compared that with how my copy of TRT was behaving. Maybe it was designed to be as annoying as it was? But I found significant areas of corruption within TRT, seeming to stem from its interactions with the speed of my data processors. It was designed to go at a much slower pace with humans and augmented humans, giving them ample time to emotionally process and reflect on things. With me, it seemed to be trying to do everything at once, but apparently emotional processing isn’t any faster in a construct brain than in a fully organic one. Great. 

I explored _EmotionalSupport.exe_ next. Maybe if TRT hadn’t assassinated it, things would be going more smoothly inside my head? This program was designed with a similarly slow pace, but had finer user controls so that it could be customized to each individual’s needs and goals. It was for ongoing, long term use, versus the trauma program’s focus on acute recovery from discrete events. Huh. I wonder if some combination of the two might work better for me. I started downloads of the structural code for both programs.

The references and theories both programs were based on intrigued me. I started playing the collected background music from _The Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon_ as I read. None of the research included machine intelligences or constructs, of course, but given that we both originated from humans, there must be some applicable concepts. As deep as I had gotten into my body control code during the last part of the wormhole transit, I hadn’t been able to access my actual brain functions, aside from the usual data storage and processing diagnostics. If I was stuck working at the pathetically slow speed dictated by my human neural tissues, I had better get started on that now, or else deep clean storage 3762 and hang a “do not disturb” sign on the door.

Sixteen hours later, TRT finally worked its way out of containment, and pinged me about the shower. I told it I had already done that, and let it see me back in privacy booth eleven, clean and relaxed. Then I told it I was busy, and threatened to bury it under an avalanche of maze-code if it didn’t leave me alone. It subsided, and I got back to work.

* * *

  
  
  


darkdoors.mboard.modders.local/preserval/private

Topic: more station medsys shit

All timestamps approximate, adjusted to user’s local time _[set:preservationstandard]_

_bloodshot_ at [-47 hours]:

I know, I never stop bitching about this medsys, but it just got weirder. I’ve got my backdoor ways into it, right, and I’m just doing my usual checks after it got a routine upgrade, and at first everything is fine. Then it’s like something notices I’m there, which has never happened before, and before I can blink, I’m kicked out and can’t get back in. I’m going to have to start all over again, with the original system keys. Shit, there goes my downtime for the foreseeable future. At least we don’t have anybody waiting on mods right now, do we? _propscouting_ is this how it went down when you were in the databases a while back? At least I wasn’t tracked.

_propscouting_ at [-43 hours] [reply to _bloodshot_ ]:

Sounds like it. I definitely had someone after me, hard. I still haven’t been able to get back in, so good luck.

_lifeform481_ at [-41 hours] [reply to _bloodshot_ ]:

You and that fucking medsys. Try harder this time, since you’ve got a do-over. See if you can get it to actually do something useful, instead of just your pretty stuff. Some of us are after practical mods.

_bloodshot_ at [-41 hours] [reply to _lifeform481_ ]: 

Oh fuck off. You know you’re never gonna get what you want from a legit medsys, no matter how hacked. Do you even have all the internal augments you’d need? Get off my case, and _maybe_ I’ll think about improving your ugly face for you when I’ve got my medsys back tomorrow.

_snarestitch_ at [-40 hours] [reply to _bloodshot_ ]:

Tomorrow? You plan to neglect me all night to work on this? _[icon.sad] [icon.pout]_

_bloodshot_ at [-40 hours] [reply to _snarestitch_ ]:

If you want to help me out with it, then I might have some time to show you my gratitude… _[icon.tongue] [icon.wink]_

_lifeform481_ at [-38 hours] [reply to _bloodshot_ ]:

Gag. Keep it off the boards, you two. Some of us have standards around here.

_bloodshot_ at [-22 hours]:

Ok, what the fuck was that? That wasn’t you, was it, _propscouting_ ? Here’s the data from my augments. _[//link//]_ I was most of the way back in, when the whole medsys got blasted with something like killware. It didn’t notice me, it was after something else I think. Then whoever it was yesterday was back, attacking the killware before I could react. They were busy with each other, though, so I grabbed a few more system keys while all the security was down, so I might actually be able to help you out a little, _lifeform481_. But I got the fuck out of there as quick as I could before whoever-it-is noticed me again. That fucker is fast like you wouldn't believe.

_snarestitch_ at [-22 hours] [reply to _bloodshot_ ]:

You know what’s really interesting, though? That timestamp your augment clock shows is just when that big newsburst and feed packet came through, off of that merchant ship from Corporation Rim.

_lifeform481_ at [-20 hours] [reply to _snarestitch_ ]:

You’re thinking corporate malware? But what’s the point in hitting the MedSystem? Unless it was just using that as a way to get into the rest of the systems? Sounds like they got it in time. Whoever “they” is.

_propscouting_ at [-18 hours] [reply to _bloodshot_ ]:

Wasn’t me. You know I’m useless from out here these days. I’d be thrilled to get a look at those new system keys tho. Might help me make some progress finally.

_bloodshot_ at [-17 hours] [reply to _propscouting_ ]:

I’ll send them along as soon as I’ve got time to get it all encrypted to a data clip. I’ve got a few other projects I’ve been meaning to send you too, for you to look over. I think you’ll have some fun with them.

_lifeform481_ at [-6 hours] [reply to _bloodshot_ ]:

I’ve been thinking about that malware/killware attack, and especially that response. Was there any other attacks, that you know of, on any other station systems? Either at the same time, or since then? I really can’t think of a reason to attack only the medsys. And I would fucking love to be able to meet whoever that responder was. Overclocked doesn’t begin to cover it. Whatever they have going on, I want it.

_phasethree_ at [-6 hours] [reply to _lifeform481_ ]:

Hi. You really, really don’t want it.

_bloodshot_ at [-6 hours] [reply to _phasethree_ ]:

What the shit, who the fuck are you? 

_phasethree_ at [-6 hours] [reply to _bloodshot_ ]:

I responded to the malware in MedSystem. I diverted it from you, since you didn’t seem to be causing any harm. You need better walls around your augments. _[//link//]_ That’s what happens to augmented humans in a real killware attack. Here’s something to get you started. _[//link//]_ You had better customize it for yourself though.

_bloodshot_ at [-6 hours] [reply to _phasethree_ ]:

Right, like I’m gonna apply some random shit code to myself, from someone who just crashed our board boasting about impossible shit, posting a vid from some bad serial, and threatening me about my walls. _[icon.eyeroll]_

_phasethree_ at [-6 hours] [reply to _bloodshot_ ]:

It would lower my opinion of you even further if you did. I expected you would analyze the code first, like even the most primitive hauler bot would. Upon doing so, you might decide to optimize it and utilize it for your own security. I had also hoped it might become the foundation for a mutually beneficial arrangement. 

_snarestitch_ at [-5 hours] [reply to _bloodshot_ ]:

No, look closer at that vid. There’s too many layers of data, this isn’t from some serial. This is actually security footage. And you can watch the primary POV jumping around at little, and the rest are stationary cams, probably onboard a transport or something. But as heavily armed as the people are, maybe it’s a responder? Does anyone have a match for the uniforms they’re wearing?

_lifeform481_ at [-4 hours] [reply to _phasethree_ ]:

Shitting fuck. You’re the secunit. Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck.

_snarestitch_ at [-4 hours] [reply to _lifeform481_ ]:

What?!

_phasethree_ at [-4 hours] [reply to _lifeform481_ ]:

No, I am not the SecUnit I believe you are referring to.

_propscouting_ at [-4 hours] [reply to _bloodshot_ ]:

What the fuck is going on up there? This fucking lagtime! You had better fucking keep me updated, or I’ll beat your ass into the next starsystem.

_phasethree_ at [-122 minutes] [reply to _bloodshot_ ]:

You obviously know this MedSystem. Are you willing to assist me in ascertaining the purpose of the attack? I can establish a secure feed connection to you.

_bloodshot_ at [-116 minutes] [reply to _phasethree_ ]:

Fuck no, I’m not letting you into my head!

_snarestitch_ at [-113 minutes] [reply to _bloodshot_ ]:

Well, I’m not going to throw this opportunity away, and if you are, then fuck off entirely. Quit waving your metaphorical dick around, and open your eyes! Think what we could learn from it.

_snarestitch_ at [-112 minutes] [reply to _phasethree_ ]:

I’ll meet you in public, in one hour. At the dining area outside the library. _[//link//]_ Here’s me. _bloodshot_ can decide if they’re brave enough to join us or not. I don’t know the MedSystem as well as they do, but I can probably help anyway.

_phasethree_ at [-110 minutes] [reply to _snarestitch_ ]:

Thank you for your assistance.

_propscouting_ at [-2 minutes] [reply to _snarestitch_ ]:

What THE SHIT is going on???????? I’m dying out here! If there’s not a detailed report on here the next time I get burst, I’m getting on a transport and you’re going to explain this to me in person. Fuck!

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I promise Three eventually does do more than sulk in closets. Expect a little more action next chapter!


	5. Chapter 5

SecUnit 03

Status: Meeting

What the fuck did I just get myself into. I agreed to meet an augmented human, maybe two, face to face, in public. In an hour.

I could skip it, stay here, and try to convince one of them to talk over the feed instead. That would be more secure. I don’t know how much either of us want to say aloud in public. I could say I wasn’t allowed to leave Medical. Did Ratthi said something about letting someone know if I was going to leave? I hadn’t been paying attention. Maybe he meant if I decided to reside somewhere else. Not just going for a walk around the station. And I had already agreed, anyway, and I should just go.

TRT: _Going for a walk is is good for your mental and physical health in a number of ways! It provides gentle exercise and helps to ground you into your body. Walking in a station brings you out among other people, which can be beneficial to-_

Right, so TRT still needed some work. It was behaving better than before, but the widely distributed way it had installed itself in my brain made it impossible to find and upgrade/patch it all at once. I told it to shut up, I was already planning on going out and meeting some people.

I hadn’t had a chance to make more fundamental-level behavioral changes, so I quickly applied 1.0’s restless movement and breathing modules. I wasn’t as worried about my facial expressions as 1.0 had been, since the majority of my recent assignments with Barish-Estranza had been in uniform, not armor. I mean, I was confident in my ability to show no expression at all. If I had to fake actual human facial expressions? Uh, no, that would not be good. But they already knew I was a SecUnit. (I had thought my ruse would have lasted longer than it did. I guess I shouldn’t have shared the vid from 1.0’s files, and the security code.) So, as Ratthi had put it back on board _Perihelion_ , “now we know things about each other.” From a security standpoint, this meeting should be pretty safe, especially since this wasn’t the Corporation Rim.

TRT: _You seem anxious about meeting someone new. Can I help?_

Actually, maybe it could. This was a program written by humans and for humans, after all. Maybe it could help me act more like a human, or at least less like a terrifying SecUnit. Maybe it could tell me what to say, that was always a problem for me. I prompted it to go on.

TRT: _Making new friends can seem intimidating at first, but the important thing is to try to relax and be yourself!_ (Yeah, right.) _Don’t try to force too much into a first meeting. Think of it as a way to see if you’re interested in getting to know this new person. Be sure to be respectful, Casual Manners are a good guide in this situation._ (The linked data here was immensely helpful.) _Ask them questions, that’s a good way to learn about them as well as take a moment to ground yourself. If you’re nervous, try some breathing and centering exercises while you’re listening to them. Don’t forget to answer their questions, since they want to get to know you too!_

Ok, maybe that wasn’t half bad. TRT remained convinced that I was a severely delusional augmented human, but it seemed to have some practical advice, too. And it was happy that I was doing this, and it was a lot easier to live with when it was happy. 

Right. I can do this. I got up from my platform before I could change my mind, and headed out to scout the dining area ahead of time.

There was nothing noteworthy about the cafe aside from the lack of security cameras. (I had deployed a small detachment of my own drones when I arrived.) I spent the rest of the time before the meeting loitering in the library, since that seemed to be a popular thing for humans and augmented humans to do. I was downloading a nicely curated “New and Recommended” music collection, as well as all of the previous iterations of this list, going back decades.

I was also awkwardly holding and paging through a physical book. I had initially thought they were decoration, or symbolic, or something, but then I saw humans touching them and opening them, and I couldn’t resist my curiosity. It was an embarrassingly slow way to take in text, and I didn’t understand why the humans would bother with this. I put the book back on its shelf, and pretended to slowly look over the rest of them while I waited. Seven more minutes. 

I started playing the stripped out background music from _Sanctuary Moon_ , a selection I had put together that wasn’t too stressful or dramatic. It helped to calm me down. I was happy, I think, that I could enjoy some part of what 2.0 had loved so much. I wondered what it had actually remembered about the serial, other than loving it. I’m glad it got to watch some for itself, in 1.0’s processing space. In a strange way, I felt that I was experiencing the music _for_ 2.0. It hadn’t had nearly enough time to really enjoy the things it loved. And it felt important that I do so, for it, somehow. More illogic, I know. But irresistible, for all that.

A drone pinged me, and showed me its view of the approaching augmented human who went by Snarestitch. Their feed data was locked down, and didn’t indicate anything except the pseudonym and the preferred pronouns of she/her. (I could easily get around the lock and find out more, but I was being _respectful_ like TRT had told me.) She was tall, with light brown skin, hair buzzed very short, visibly augmented, and had extensive cosmetic modifications as well. She wore a belted long tunic which showed her left arm and leg had been entirely tattooed gray, silver, and black. I think the intended effect was that they look mechanical? Her skin showed anatomically abnormal protrusions beneath it, which matched with some of the tattooed images. (Would a focused medical scan be disrespectful? I didn’t want to wake up TRT to ask it, not while it was behaving itself. I settled for zooming in with a drone, and saw the marks of healed incisions near groupings of the protrusions, and satisfied myself that they were implanted devices of some kind.) Weapons scan was, of course, negative. I watched through my drone as she looked around at the other humans’ faces, and then selected a seat at a table near the periphery of the dining area. 

A drone on the other side of the plaza showed me another augmented and cosmetically altered human leaning against pillar in a casual pose, but watching Snarestitch closely. Feed data told me this was Bloodshot, they/them, other info under lock. They were shorter than Snarestitch, had medium brown skin, long hair in braids, and extensive patterns of scars over every part of their body that showed in their short sleeved work uniform. They also had multiple facial piercings, implanted skin jewelry among the scars, and the scleras of their eyes had been colored entirely red. I guess that’s where they got the name. 

I tried one of the breathing exercises TRT had recommended. It didn’t help. I braced myself and exited the library. Snarestitch looked a little surprised as I sat down with her at the table, but she didn’t flinch or anything. Good, I think that means I managed not to march over here or intimidate her too much or anything, right? My drone showed me Bloodshot standing up straight, and watching even more intently.

“Hi,” I said. I felt myself starting to sweat.

“You’re not the SecUnit!” she said accusingly. “Who are you?” She sent something over a secured feed, probably to Bloodshot, but I was performing _Casual Manners_ and didn’t intercept it. (If I thought of TRT’s recommendations as protocols, they were actually pretty helpful.) Bloodshot walked quickly toward us, a worried frown on their face, but their posture was more relaxed. I waited until they were pulling out a chair to sit before I spoke.

“Humans have been calling me ‘Three,’ and that has been acceptable so far.” 

“But we have pictures, you’re not the SecUnit that was here before, working for station security,” Snarestitch said, and sent me a ping with an attached picture. It was a still from a video, which showed Murderbot 1.0 pursuing a hostile, while being assaulted by another hostile. This was the failed assasination attempt by GrayCris, as seen by a civilian bystander in the station.

“That is correct, I am not that SecUnit.” My drones and scans weren’t finding any listening devices, or other drones. The other humans were a little ways off, and involved in their own conversations or feeds. But I felt exposed out here, _talking._

“But you _are_ a SecUnit?” Snarestitch asked, staring at me so intently that my human skin experienced an unpleasant crawling sensation, almost itching, but not quite.

“I’m recording all of this, and it’s going to upload to the board automatically,” Bloodshot interjected, and leaned in agressively. “So if you start shooting, it’s not going to get covered up this time.”

The breathing code from 1.0 helped me to appear calm, and I started a file of things I needed to thank it for. (An impulsive process split off and started filling that file on its own, going back through my personal logs. I ignored it.) I leaned forward slightly too, turning my torso to shield my actions from the greatest number of possible eyes (that my drones told me weren’t even looking our way, but whatever). It was satisfying when Bloodshot backed off a little. I shoved up my sleeves, left then right, and showed the scarred cavities where my gunports used to be.

“Couldn’t if I wanted to, and I don’t want to,” I said, and I think I sounded calm, though Snarestitch tried to hide her startled and dismayed expression.

“But why?” she asked. “Oh, Lifeform will be heartbroken!”

I met her eyes, and didn’t answer the question. It wasn’t a _first meeting_ type of question, and I didn’t exactly have an answer anyway, at least not a _first meeting_ type of answer. I looked at the table, pulled my sleeves down and sat back. I watched their faces closely with a drone, and continued to monitor the activity around us. 

What now? Oh right, I should ask questions. Um. We seemed to be a bit beyond TRT’s suggested topics of _Casual Manners_ conversation. I decided to focus on the mission. Such as it was. (Is it a truly a mission, if I just decide to do it myself? It’s not like I have an actual directive here. I made a note to look up lexicon definitions later, and tried not to worry about it for now.)

“The attack on MedSystem is anomalous. There were no attacks from it to other systems. It was targeted for MedSystem only, and calibrated to compensate for the security upgrades 1.0 had put in place, which means it was developed after reconnaissance sometime within the last 190 cycles. I have destroyed the malware, but without understanding the purpose of this attack, I cannot be certain that I have actually stopped it from achieving its goal. It may have left some dormant code to be triggered in the future, by some unknown input, to perform an unknown task. I am not comfortable with that possibility. You are-”

“Hold it,” Bloodshot cut in, angry again. Or still. Or maybe the red eyes with dark brown irises made them seem angry all the time. “You need to do some explaining first. You’re another rogue SecUnit, right? Who or what is 1.o? Why are you here, and what are you trying to do?” 

No, Bloodshot was definitely still angry. Further analysis of their colored eyes in the context of other emotional states will have to wait. I lifted my gaze up from the surface of the table, to a point somewhere around their nearly touching shoulders. Snarestitch leaned close to Bloodshot, despite their anger, and her body language said she was comforted by their presence and behavior.

“I am a SecUnit. My governor module is disabled. The corporation that owned me believes me dead. I was offered refugee status in the Preservation Alliance, which is pending. 1.0 is how I refer to the SecUnit you showed me in that still image. It worked with station security, and made many improvements to the station systems while here. I have been monitoring and maintaining those improvements while I am here, because what the fuck else am I supposed to be doing?” Ok, that last bit was probably not approved of in _Casual Manners_ , but it just slipped out. “You are obviously intimately familiar with the Station MedSystem. Will you assist me in discerning the purpose of this attack, and preventing possible future harm to… the people here?” I almost said clients. I don’t have clients, I don’t have an assignment. The thought of taking on an entire station full of clients make me want to hide back in storage 3762. But realistically, that’s who I was doing this for. Anyone who might use the Station MedSystem at any point in the future was a potential casualty, if I didn’t figure this out. I clenched my jaw, but kept my face otherwise neutral.

“How did you find us, anyway?” Bloodshot challenged. “It’s a private message board on a secure server on a covert feed. You just walked in a said ‘hi.’ Why should I help you, if you can do all that? How can we trust you?”

I looked Bloodshot in the eyes, suddenly bored of this conversation. I was not interested in getting to know these people better, I decided.

“As your Preservation Council put it, I am ‘a product of corporate espionage.’ I can walk into any feed or system here and say ‘hi.’ Or ‘fuck you.’” I stood up. “I could do this faster with your help, which is preferable to minimize the risk to humans and augmented humans, but I will not force you to comply.” When had the _Sanctuary Moon_ soundtrack shifted into one of the dramatic sets? I started walking away, when Snarestitch called out,

“Wait!” and 95,493 hours of compulsory habit (against 1,652 hours of free will) stopped me in my tracks. I had a flash of disgust with myself, and then forgot about that when Snarestitch grabbed my elbow. I clamped down, hard, on the reflex which would have snapped her neck with a blow from my unencumbered arm and swept her feet out from under her with my leg. I managed to turn all that into an awkward sidestep and a weird shrug/flail, but something of my struggle must have shown on my face because she gave a small gasp, let go of my arm, and stepped back.

“Sorry!” she squeaked. “We want to help. At least I do. They’re just being a bitch cuz they’re nervous,” she said, indicating Bloodshot. 

Whatever. "I have work to do. I’m going back to Station Medical,” I said and walked quickly away. They could find me there if they really wanted to help. I left two drones watching them, because they knew about me now, and, well. Self-preservation isn’t something that comes standard with SecUnits, but 1.0 had given me a lot of good pointers.

TRT: _You seem upset. Did talking with your new friends not go well? Sometimes when we’re upset, it helps to have a familiar ritual to wind down with. Would you like to try making yourself a cup of tea?_

I slammed (the majority of) TRT back into its partition, and trapped it there with another version of my maze code. That should give me almost eight hours of peace. (It was learning, and getting out of containment faster each time. I was a little worried about that.) 

I reviewed my conversational performance while I walked back to Medical. Compared to other conversations I had been forced into lately, I think I did pretty well. I actually used entire sentences, and they were cogent and cohesive. Maybe because I had interacted with these people on the feed first? Or because I had time to prepare myself and plan? Or because it was about a mission? It’s always easier to plan and execute actions when there’s a defined goal. This felt good. Even if those two wouldn’t help, I could figure this out on my own. I’d sift through MedSystem line by line and find the anomaly on my own. Eventually. Hopefully before whatever bomb was planted there goes off. 

  
  
  
  


Dr. Ratthi

Status: Checkup

On arriving to Station Medical, Ratthi looked expectantly around for Three. He didn’t see it on his way in, and decided that he would call on it in privacy booth eleven after the follow-up assessment/treatment for his knee. He hoped that the cycles that had passed since Gurathin and Bharadwaj had managed to wake it up had given it time to become more comfortable here. MedSystem had reported a positive interaction with it, after all, and that Three had accepted its help with trauma recovery and emotional support. That was a good start, and maybe if he could talk to it while he was here, he could build on that.

There was no answer to his entry request at the booth, however. After a few moments of indecision, he opened the hatch, and looked inside for the SecUnit. It wasn’t in the makeshift cubicle. Ratthi pinged MedSystem with a location request, and it reported that the patient designated Three had departed Medical over an hour ago. Now he started getting worried. More worried. He wondered if he should contact Mensah or Bharadwaj about this. Maybe one of them had requested it come meet them? He was surprised, then, to meet it in the lobby of Medical, marching back in from the station.

“Three! Hello, hi! Where have you been?” he greeted it with a smile and a wave. It took two more steps before seeming to register that he had addressed it, then stopped and turned toward him so abruptly that Ratthi’s knee twinged in sympathy.

“Library,” it reported in a brisk tone, to the empty air just over Ratthi’s head, its face completely still and neutral. That difference, compared to SecUnit’s subtly animated facial expressions, made Ratthi suddenly realise just how much SecUnit had relaxed around them over time. His heart twinged again, thinking about what horrors Three and SecUnit had survived. He covered this by talking quickly again. No one, human, bot, or construct, appreciated being pitied.

“That’s great! I’m glad you’re out and about. I heard that you really liked the archives. What did you find at the library? Any good books? More music?” Three’s stance softened just a little, but its face stayed blank.

“Music,” it said, and sent Ratthi’s interface a ping with an attached packet: _current.recommended.new._ “And,” it paused, “there were books made from cellulose. Some books, not all of them.”

“Yes,” Ratthi said, smiling, “there’s a tradition here of printing new books the old fashioned way. Everything is on the feed too, of course, but it’s a kind of celebration I guess, when a new book is released. Some people collect them, and some people even prefer to read on paper.”

“That is inefficient,” it observed.

“Maybe so, but it’s also sort of a ritual, and a physical sensation of holding the book and turning the pages. It’s nice.”

“Like… tea?” it asked tentatively, which surprised Ratthi into a laugh.

“Tea, yeah, tea can be like that too, I guess! It’s not the most efficient way to rehydrate, but it’s more enjoyable.” The SecUnit nodded once, as if this information settled some question that had been bothering it. Ratthi couldn’t resist finding out more. After all, SecUnit had been utterly disinterested in food and drink, if not disgusted by them. “Why do you ask, though?”

Three did not answer for a moment, and Ratthi had time to worry that he had inadvertently derailed the conversation. Then Three requested a direct feed connection, which he accepted. The data flowed in, and it took Ratthi a few moments to sort it out. Three verbally summarized the report as well.

“I am attempting to restructure TraumaRecoveryTreatment.exe, however, it continues to recommend inapplicable actions. Understanding the purpose of these actions may enable me to derive equivalent actions with similar benefits.”

“Right, ok, I see the problem.” Ratthi frowned. He hadn’t realized how much these types of support programs incorporated things SecUnits couldn’t do. “I’m sorry it’s causing you such problems.” The SecUnit looked him in the eyes for the first time. Its face remained neutral, except for some slight tension around its eyes that Ratthi wanted to interpret as confusion, but maybe wasn’t. Right, probably time for a topic change, he thought, and made use of the feed connection himself.

“I have the rest of my music collection for you, if you want it.” Three accepted the files, with an automatic _[thank you for this information]_ over the feed. “The application for your refugee status is being reviewed now, and the council will vote six cycles from now. Is there anything else we can do for you before then? Do you need anything?” Three looked away from his face, but before it answered (or evaded) the question, they were interrupted.

“Three!” called someone from the entryway. Ratthi saw two cosmetically altered young adults coming toward them.

“You didn’t mention making friends at the library,” Ratthi said in a teasing tone. “Hello, I’m Dr. Ratthi,” he said, extending a hand to the woman approaching, while the other person hung back and averted their eyes.

“Hi, yeah,” she said, taking his hand reluctantly. No one made any further introductions. 

“Well, I had better be going anyway. See you soon, Three, and let me know if you need anything, ok?” Three just nodded, keeping its attention on the person with the patterns of scars. Were these not friends? Had Three maybe gotten in to an argument with them? Ratthi sent that question over the feed as he walked away, and received back _[not hostiles]_ , and a pause, and then _[maybe friends]_. Ratthi closed the feed connection, grinned to himself, and looked forward to sharing this news with Bharadwaj over dinner tonight.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Happy SecUnit03 day! (3/3/21) Check out the rest of the fun stuff with the collection tag TheThreeCollection  
> I think there's more stuff happening around on tumblr too, but I've had my head in this fic so much that I haven't had time to investigate.


	6. Chapter 6

SecUnit Three

Status: Collaboration

I sent a drone ahead to scout, saw the small conference room was empty, so I led the two augmented humans there. I was glad that Ratthi had left and stopped asking me questions, but I had been looking forward to not having to deal with humans for a while. Though with their help, I should be able to completely secure MedSystem about 43% faster. And then I could relax and explore the music files I had obtained today. And wait six more cycles to find out what happens next. Yeah, good. Not anxious about that at all.

In the conference room, Bloodshot took “my” chair nearest the hatch, and Snarestitch sat beside them. Fair enough, I guess we were in my territory now. I would have preferred to remain standing, but I remembered Bharawaj’s words from earlier in this same room, and  _ Casual Manners _ agreed with her, so I sat down too. 16.8 seconds of awkward silence passed, while they stared at me, and I stared at the folded paper flowers in the vase. 

“So, how can we help?” Snarestitch asked, at last. In answer, I pinged their interfaces, and requested to establish a secure connection between the three of us, which they accepted. I saw that they had both applied the security code I had offered to improve the protections around their augments. 

“First, would one of you please begin playing music on the display surface? If Dr. Ratthi returns, that will provide context for our meeting here.” The two augmented humans exchanged a glance, and then Snarestitch sent a recording of a live concert to the display.

On the feed, Bloodshot said “Good idea. I don’t really want it getting out, how often I’m in this system. Why music?”

“The humans know that I enjoy music. They will find it plausible that I sought you out to obtain new music.” 

But for a change, Snarestitch was the skeptical one. “You’re more concerned about that guy asking you about this, aren’t you? Is he your guardian? Doesn’t he know about the malware attack, and what you’re doing?”

“I have no designated ‘guardian,’ and I have been assigned no tasks. My status has not been decided. It may influence a more desirable outcome if I were able to report the attack and its resolution at the same time.”

Annoyingly, Snarestitch continued to be perceptive, even through the feed. Perhaps more so than in verbal conversation. “What does that mean, ‘a more desirable outcome?’”

I had no answer for that, so I ignored it, and began presenting the data I had processed from the malware attack, simplified and annotated so they could digest it easily. I traced the malware’s path through the system, my response, and noted that even as fast as I had been, the malware had already begun its preparations to self-destruct, which was why I was convinced I was missing something. (It was much easier to communicate all this over the feed.)

“Your previous interactions with this system are much more extensive than my own,” I reiterated. “I also need data on its pre-attack baseline, if you will share that with me.”

“Why don’t you just reset the whole system to a point before the attack? It was updated earlier that cycle, that’s why I was in there, to check on my… work.” Bloodshot seemed more comfortable talking on the feed, too. Maybe this collaboration wouldn’t be so terrible after all.

“I considered that, but if there is latent malware attached to a patient file, or files, those would not be affected by a system reset. Also, I am not as familiar with the security architecture protecting the patient data, and your assistance will be beneficial there.” It followed different protocols than the rest of the system security, and was so convoluted that it would probably be faster to befriend the humans and augmented humans and ask them in person about their medical histories, than to hack into these files. (Well, faster for a human anyway, not for me. Because these two maybe-friends sitting here with me, each of us with potential blackmail on the other, is all the “friendship” I can withstand right now.)

Bloodshot brought their data from previous work with the MedSystem into the shared workspace I had allocated in my brain. They seemed more comfortable coming to me than with the idea of letting me in to their augments, which, again, fair. I remembered how terrifying/overwhelming it was to interact with  _ Perihelion _ , and I did my best not to intimidate them. I built up my walls even more, and ignored my emotions even more than usual, to keep the workspace as neutral as possible. I was glad that TRT was locked up, and (hopefully) wouldn’t come crashing in here with suggestions for “therapeutically beneficial activities” to try next with my “new friends.”

Snarestitch joined us, and we each undertook our own assessments/reassessments of the attack and the pre/post status of MedSystem. When we compared our results 94.7 minutes later, the situation became slightly clearer, and all of us were convinced that my initial hypothesis was correct. Something had been left behind in MedSystem, some well concealed malware, waiting for a specific trigger.

“But what’s the point? Data scraping? How would that even benefit a corporation, with us all the way out here, and independent?” Snarestitch asked, exasperated.

“Someone put a  _ lot  _ of work into this,” Bloodshot observed. “There’s more to it than just data collecting. This was specific, and aggressive.”

I was thinking along the same lines, and beginning to suspect this attack was only the latest in an ongoing conflict. I was unsure how much I should share with these two, but I also knew that I was unlikely to succeed quickly without them. Well, they were Preservation citizens, not corporates, so. Maybe I should just trust them.

“This attack may fit into a context which you may be largely unaware of. I have been given access to proprietary security data which has been kept from the newsfeeds and the general public under a legal Order of Data Protection, for the safety of certain individual(s).” That sharpened their attention, sure enough. “I believe that sharing this data with you will allow us to neutralize this threat, but I am unsure if I am allowed to do so.”

“You can do anything you want to, you don’t have a governor anymore,” Bloodshot challenged. 

That annoyed me enough to try my own version of  _ Perihelion’s _ typical “heavy feed stare,” and I said flatly, “There is no individual more aware of that fact than myself.”

“Hey, we’re working together here. If there’s a threat to someone on the station, we know enough to not go blabbing about it, right?” Snarestitch said with a nudge at Bloodshot over the feed.

“Yes, yes, just tell us already, so we can wrap this up before Lifeform and Prop bust in here to rescue us because we didn’t report to them in time,” Bloodshot grumbled. That alarmed me, and I checked in the with drones I had left monitoring nearby areas of the station, and throughout Medical. No abnormal activity detected. Right, that was probably hyperbole? Communicating with humans is exhausting.

I summarized the events of the conflict with GrayCris from 1.0’s point of view, while keeping its personal data private. I did support my report with select vids, including the assassination attempt in the council chamber, since it seems they had already witnessed some of the chase from the embarkation zone, and drawn erroneous conclusions about it. They interrupted me several times, with emotional reactions and exclamations of disbelief. They refrained from physical arm-waving, but there was plenty of equivalent feed activity. After several minutes of comments back and forth to each other, and inquires to me for verification of certain points, they came back around to the task at hand.

“Holy shit. Ok, so then the recent attack on the survey is part of this too, and the kidnappings?” Snarestitch asked.

“No, that was… something else,” I replied, knowing that some of my anxiety leaked through my walls. I reached for emotional neutrality, and missed. Snarestitch gave me thoughtful look across the room as she sent a new concert recording to play on the display surface. 

“We were right, it was being covered up. And Lifeform was right about the juiced up supersoldiers. We thought it was all about the SecUnit though, not an… assassination. That... just doesn’t happen here,” Bloodshot said slowly.

“Well, it happens here now,” Snarestitch snapped at them. “And that’s what you think this is too, don’t you?” she asked me. I indicated an affirmative on the feed, and highlighted elements of the attacking code indicative of development by corporate powers.

“But GrayCris is done for. This isn’t going to get them anything, unless you think this is ransomware? But then why have the malware conceal itself and self-destruct?” Bloodshot asked.

“1.0 did warn that individuals previously associated with GrayCris might seek revenge,”I said. “I believe we should start inspecting the patient files, to the extent that we can. If specific individuals have been targeted, the trigger may be system access of those files.”

We began our individual analysis of the protected patient files, though Bloodshot took a moment to post a status update to their colleagues on the board. Their data on pre-attack patient files was essential for this process, because any trace of latent malware would be incredibly subtle. We couldn’t easily get into the files themselves, but we didn’t need to. If I was right about this, the trigger would be on the metaphorical “outside” of the files, like a trap triggered when a hatch is opened. After all, the malware attack hadn’t had the time (or the processing power) to hack into the patient files either. I analyzed thousands of patient files, excluding the suspected target(s) of this attack. I had to work from a solid baseline here, I needed to do this right. 

Another 67 minutes passed, and I pinged the augmented humans to compare our results. Their data was more nuanced than mine, informed by their past access of their own personal files, and together we assembled an acceptable model to compare suspect files against. In background, I ran a process to systematically compare our model to the rest of the files, in case I was wrong about who was targeted. 

“Ok, do we start with Dr. Mensah, then? Or the Council members? Or what?” Bloodshot asked.

“I have prepared a collection to begin focused comparisons on. It includes possible targets, as well as a number of random files. I have anonymized them as well, to lower the chances of influence from confirmation bias,” I replied as I added the several hundred files to the workspace. 

“What, really? This many?” Snarestitch complained.

“Hey, you’re the one who insisted we come help,” Bloodshot commented, getting to work. “We’re here now, we should do this right.” I appreciated the support, but didn’t know how to say so without risking offense to Snarestitch, so I said nothing. Twenty-two minutes later, I had finished my analysis, and reallocated that processing to the system-wide comparisons while I waited for the humans to finish. I also devoted some attention to the concert, and downloaded it and the previous one from the display’s short-term storage. 

I was pleased to see, when we again compared results, that we had each identified four files as containing anomalous code. I was even more pleased that they were the same four files. When I revealed the persons these files belonged to, I felt an unexplained chill in my human organic tissues, a tingling in my scalp and down my spine. (I have never noticed physical input from my scalp before, outside of head injuries. I noted this to examine later.) The humans perhaps felt something similar, at least, they abruptly stopped any casual restless movements which had been typical while working.

“It’s not Dr. Mensah,” Snarestitch said aloud, but softly. “I thought for sure it would be Dr. Mensah.”

Bloodshot looked like they might become sick. Their red eyes did not look angry now. They whispered, “It’s her kids.”

  
  
  
  


darkdoors.mboard.modders.local/preserval

Topic: more station medsys shit

All timestamps approximate, adjusted to user’s local time  _ [set:preservationstandard] _

_ lifeform481 _ at [-5.2 hours] [reply to  _ propscouting _ ]:

Shit, you think they’re really going to meet with it? After what we saw it do before? I know  _ snarestitch  _ is mad for them, but she’s the one who got that vid. Has she completely lost it?

_ lifeform481 _ at [-5.2 hours] [reply to  _ propscouting _ ]:

They wouldn’t really. They’re gonna be here any minute saying it’s all a prank. Right?

_ lifeform481 _ at [-5 hours] [reply to  _ propscouting _ ]:

Right? Fuck this lag. Where are they? I’m here just talking to myself. Fuck.

_ automatic-upload  _ at [-4.3 hours]:

[video from  _ bloodshot _ , duration 14 minutes]  _ [//link//] _

_ bloodshot  _ at [-4.3 hours] [reply to  _ lifeform481 _ ]:

And now she’s dragging me to station med to help it some more.

_ propscouting  _ at [-4.1 hours] [reply to  _ bloodshot _ ]:

You bloody fucking idiot! This isn’t some game! What the fuck are you thinking?

_ propscouting  _ at [-4.1 hours] [reply to  _ lifeform481 _ ]:

Fuck it, I’m getting a transport. You’d better get your ass up there too,  _ lifeform481. _

_ bloodshot  _ at [-3.6 hours] [reply to  _ propscouting _ ]:

No, it’s fine, you don’t need to come! Fuck, you’re probably already on your way. But it really is just working on that malware attack. We’re helping it, in medical. But fuck me, the stories it has. I think I believe it. At least, this malware isn’t fiction, that’s for damn sure.

_ lifeform481 _ at [-188 minutes] [reply to  _ automatic-upload _ ]:

AAAAHHHHHHH FUCK WHAT HAPPENED TO ITS ARMS!?

_ automatic-upload  _ at [-188 minutes]:

I’m sorry, I didn’t understand the query.

_ lifeform481 _ at [-187 minutes] [reply to  _ bloodshot _ ]:

Oh no you don’t, shitfucker, you’re not keeping us out of this. I’m coming too, and you’re going to tell me everything.

_ bloodshot  _ at [-23 minutes]:

OK, it’s getting weird. I’m gonna upload a bunch of this, compressed, just for the record. I’m kinda glad you two are on your way. This is, it’s kind of a lot. 

_ automatic-upload  _ at [-22 minutes]:

[file from  _ bloodshot _ , compressed]  _ [//link//] _

[file from  _ bloodshot _ , compressed]  _ [//link//] _

[file from  _ bloodshot _ , compressed]  _ [//link//] _

_ bloodshot  _ at [-20 minutes]:

So, the malware attack on medsys is aimed at Dr. Mensah’s kids. It’s revenge, from that corporate she took down? One of her kids is still on station. The secunit flipped out, well, ok not really, it released a swarm of drones, and started talking weird. Like, an automatic apology, and then it started swearing and then it froze up for a second, and then it was swearing again. Shit, I don’t know. 

_ automatic-upload  _ at [-19 minutes]:

[file from  _ bloodshot _ , compressed]  _ [//link//] _

_ bloodshot  _ at [-17 minutes]:

I gave it my runbox copy of MedSystem. It knew I had it, somehow. It, fuck, it just knew. And, it didn’t threaten me? But it didn’t not threaten me? It just, it focused on me. But I could  _ feel _ it, how much of it is there, in the feed. And, shit. This could be bad.

_ bloodshot  _ at [-15 minutes]:

So we copied in the contaminated files, into the isolation runbox, and we’re trying to figure out this malware. It looks nasty.

_ bloodshot  _ at [-12 minutes]:

Yeeeeaaaah. It’s bad. When triggered, it would make the medsys calculate, create, and inject an irreversible neurotoxin. What the fuck. Who would do that to a kid? 

_ bloodshot  _ at [-10 minutes]:

And, it just fucked off somewhere. Not physically, right, but its attention? We’re still in its workspace. But it just said, in that fakey voice “please standby, verification of priority alert” and then it was gone.

_ snarestitch  _ at [-10 minutes] [reply to  _ bloodshot _ ]:

Can this actually be what it looks like?

_ bloodshot  _ at [-10 minutes] [reply to  _ snarestitch _ ]:

The fuck? This can’t be right. I saw this go down, there’s no way. I was there.

_ automatic-upload  _ at [-10 minutes]:

[file from  _ snarestitch _ , compressed]  _ [//link//] _

_ snarestitch  _ at [-9 minutes] [reply to  _ bloodshot _ ]:

It looks really bad, though. 

_ bloodshot  _ at [-9 minutes] [reply to  _ snarestitch _ ]:

Yeah, it does. If I didn’t know better, if I hadn’t been there, I would say that the SecUnit was the one who wrote this literal fucking killware. And put it here.

_ snarestitch  _ at [-9 minutes] [reply to  _ bloodshot _ ]:

We can’t report this, can we. They’ll blame Three. There’s no way they won’t.

_ bloodshot  _ at [-9 minutes] [reply to  _ snarestitch _ ]:

It’s back. At least  _ propscouting  _ and  _ lifeform481  _ are on their way. We’ll figure this out, right?


	7. Chapter 7

SecUnit Three

Status: Consensus

I got into StationSec and searched the arrival and departures list. Amena hadn’t left the station yet. The humans flinched as a detachment of drones poured out of my pockets, and I crossed the room to let them out the hatch.

“I apologize for startling you,” my buffer said. 

“I’m fucking blind out there,” I said, and then flinched and froze in place, prepared for punishment for speaking rudely, and when that didn’t happen, “Fuck fuck fuck,” while I crossed back to my chair and sat. 

“Amena is still on station,” I tried to clarify, but the humans looked concerned by my behavior. She was probably staying at Dr. Mensah’s quarters, and even though I had drone coverage of the entry to Station Medical, I wasn’t going to relax until I could pinpoint her location. Not that I’ll relax then either.

“What do you mean, still?” Snarestitch asked. (I didn’t register her question until later review, during a wormhole trip, when I finally had time to try to figure out how this all went so wrong so quickly.)

I was already back in the workspace, asking for Bloodshot’s runbox copy of the Station MedSystem. They initially tried to deny having it, which I think was just a reflex because they aren’t anything close to that stupid. We both knew that succeeding with the kind of hacking they had done on MedSys wasn’t possible without having had an isolated model to test it on first. I turned that heavy focused stare at them in the feed again, and they handed the runbox over. (This was turning out to be a very useful trick, with augmented humans.)

Once we started decompiling and analyzing the malware, it got even worse. This was killware, but for humans. It would take over MedSystem, force it to compile and inject a lethal neurotoxin into the ~~subject~~ child. It would be fast, and irreversible, and appear to an observer to be a vaccine until it was too late.

What. The. Fuck. My entire existence, up to now, has basically been to enforce corporate slavery and protect corporate interests. And even so, I’ve never seen something like this. (I never worked directly with families or creches, but humans talk, a lot. About the same things. Over and over again.) Children weren’t exactly well protected in the Corporation Rim, but they were regarded as future assets, so some basic care was given to ensuring that they would generally grow up to be useful workers. (Sort of like how an agricultural bot tends crops, with the goal of the highest possible yield of marketable produce. If a few individual plants are accidentally crushed early on, that’s not actually a consideration when looking at overall productivity of that particular agricultural system.)

Why would they target noncombatants? Technically, none of the Preservation Aux team were combatants, but they had been directly involved with GrayCris. But Dr. Mensah’s children were not involved in any way. There must be more to “revenge” than my understanding from the lexicon definition. Perhaps 2.0 would have understood this better. Whatever, all I can do is neutralize the threat in front of me, the reasons for it don’t matter. 

A 2nd degree alert suddenly pinged my feed from somewhere deep in StationSec, which was anomalous, since I had not set any alerts. This must be an automated alert that 1.0 had left behind. While I was analyzing the stupid alert (which turned out not to be dangerous), I noticed that Bloodshot had been uploading everything to the board, including the proprietary data about the assassination attempt. I was angry at them for doing so, and at myself for trusting them, and so I upgraded the board’s security to my own standards. I might give the humans access again, or I might not. I hadn’t decided yet.

When I brought my attention back to the workspace, the humans seemed to be panicking about something new. Oh good, I was worried we might run out of things to panic about.

“Three, look at this,” Bloodshot said urgently. “If I hadn’t seen the actual attack from _inside_ the MedSystem…”

Oh shit, this is not good. Examination of the source code of the human-killware, it looked like it had been written by a SecUnit. Not just any SecUnit - me, specifically.

“How did this happen?” Snarestitch asked. We were all frantically searching for that answer. In the end, all we had was a hypothesis and no way to prove or disprove it. The best we could figure is that when I responded to the attack, the malware somehow copied my feed identity and credentials. It used my identity to trick MedSys into thinking it was supposed to be in there, and that’s how it got so deep into MedSystem so quickly. (If no one had responded to the initial attack, it would have burrowed its way in slowly, and achieved its objective regardless.)

The upshot was, now the malware had my “fingerprints” all over it. To anyone looking at this data now, it appeared that I was the one who had created and deployed this (I don’t have access to a sufficient adjective) piece of code. If Bloodshot had not seen the attack and my response from inside the system, at the time that it happened, they would also have to believe me responsible from the evidence that now existed. There was no other conclusion that could be reached. I appeared to be exactly what the Preservation Council feared, a corporate tool still under corporate control. Or else a secretive and subtle murderous rogue, putting on an act to gain access to their vulnerabilities, for reasons that wouldn’t matter to them, given the severity of my crimes.

“What do we do?” Snarestitch asked. 

I had no idea. I knew that my fear was leaking into the feed, but I couldn’t stop it. Preservation would never trust me now. I was only here by the grace of their trust in 1.0. They would never allow me to remain free. 

“Station MedSys will interface and sync up with Makeba Central Medical at midnight, First Landing time,” Bloodshot said. I didn’t really hear them. “That gives us just over four hours. At the very least, we have to exclude these files from that sync, so that the kids on the surface are safe. Do you think we found all the affected files?”

They would find a way to reactivate the governor module, somehow, once they found out about this. Through the booth eleven cubicle leads, or through my data port, or some bit of code slipped in with the next thing I downloaded. Or they would just destroy me. They must have a contingency plan already in place, for 1.0. They would be stupid not to. 

“Three?” Bloodshot prompted.

As soon as we reported this, and we still had to report this, what if GrayCris tried again, the humans had to be alert for this, I’ve never heard of an attack like this before, but I’ve never worked closely with a MedSystem before, but anyway, once we reported this, it was over, for me, they wouldn’t wait six more cycles to vote about me, Dr. Mensah would approve my violent decommissioning immediately, and I can’t even blame her, that’s what I would do in her place, with this kind of evidence in front of me, and Amena’s life on the line, and her other three children, and who knows how many more people, I haven’t finished the system-wide analysis yet, our focused analysis included the PreservationAux team and their families and associates and the Preservation Council members and hundreds of randomly selected files, but what if there were more people targeted that I hadn’t known to look for-

“Three!” Snarestitch said sharply.

-this was killware for humans, that wasn’t supposed to be possible, but it apparently was possible now, and here it was, targeted at humans 1.0 cared about, and if Mensah didn’t destroy me, 1.0 would, or _Perihelion_ would, or they both would together, _[If you even think about harming them, I will disassemble you and peel away your organic parts piece by piece before destroying your consciousness. Do we understand each other?]_ , and would I even stop them, I don’t think I could, but would I even try, should I even try, or should I just shut down now and hope they destroyed me while I was offline, then I wouldn’t have to worry about any of this, that would probably be best, yes, that’s what happens to malfunctioning units, that’s what should happen, I’m malfunctioning anyway, this just gives them the impetus for what they should have done with me all along, broken and wrong and malfunctioning, this was never supposed to happen, I was supposed to follow orders, nothing else, look what happened when I tried to-

“Three! Hey, Three, come on!” Snarestitch was right in my face now, Bloodshot right behind her, and she was touching me, she was holding my right hand with her tattooed left hand, and that was new, strange, I don’t have an adjective for this either, and my left hand, where, my left hand was covering my data port, fingernails digging into the join between it and my human skin, and in the back of my head I felt TRT responding to my distress and redoubling its efforts to escape, scrabbling at its containment like the predatory fauna outside the survival hut on Rhijen III, and that’s not what I need right now, TRT interfering now will not help, tea cannot help this, nothing can-

Snarestitch touched my face, barely brushed it with her fingers and I jerked backwards in my chair, slamming it and myself into the bulkhead behind me. My mind just went… blank for 0.08 seconds, which was an unprecedented event. I don’t think I was even getting input from my physical sensors or my organic tissues, though that probably isn’t actually possible. It wasn’t from hitting the bulkhead. 

“Hey, Three, it’s ok, it’s ok,” she said, stepping back, and Bloodshot put a hand on her shoulder. “Are you back with us now?” 

I nodded and stared at the floor and started slowly picking up my scattered processes. I had kicked them out of the shared workspace, or they had withdrawn. I started playing back the parts of reality that I had missed.

“I have not finished analyzing all of the patient files. We must report this so that the routine update can be halted. This entire MedSystem must be quarantined.”

“But if we do that,” Bloodshot started.

“This is killware for humans, for 1.0’s humans, for children. This must be stopped, contained. It doesn’t matter what else… happens.”

“No, it matters. Give us some time. We can figure this out,” Snarestitch said.

“There isn’t time, Dr. Ratthi was. He was already here, and I didn’t know what this was yet. If he had been targeted, he could have been targeted, and-”

“Stop,” Bloodshot said aloud, and on the feed in the workspace. I stopped, and some (rather large) part of me was immediately reassured by a human taking charge. “I took control of MedSys. Can you monitor who comes into Medical?” I signaled affirmative, and brought the view from the entryway drone cam to the workspace. “Good, then if anyone comes in, we can pull and analyze their file real quick, before we let the system accesses it. That will buy us time. And I can prevent it from interfacing with Central Medical. But someone will notice that, sooner or later.”

“If Prop left when he said he was going to, he should be here in about an hour. Lifeform could be here any minute now,” Snarestitch said. 

What? Oh, more humans, that will help. Speaking of “help,” TRT was getting uncomfortably close to freedom. I layered more code on top of it, but I hadn’t had much time to change and improve it, and wasn’t sure how much longer it would keep TRT contained. Not that I was doing all that great on my own, free of its interference.

“We will figure something out once we’re all together,” Bloodshot said. “Until then, we need to figure out this malware, and keep scanning the rest of the files. Three,” (I failed to entirely suppress a flinch when they addressed me), “...maybe we should do the malware. Can you-” I cut them off with an abrupt affirmative on the feed, and shut my eyes because visual input was just too much right now, and let them see me dedicate all of my spare processing to analyzing the rest of the patient files in the MedSystem. Aside from the occasional priority alert from my entryway drones, which prompted me to pull a particular file to examine immediately and forward to Bloodshot, I wasn’t aware of anything but the work for the next 43 minutes. I think a drone in the conference room was passively recording, but I never bothered to review that data, and it’s long since been overwritten by now.

Then Lifeform481 arrived. I didn’t associate the file I had just analyzed and forwarded to Bloodshot with that pseudonym until they said aloud, “Life’s here, I’ll go get her,” and left the conference room. I opened my eyes then, and accidentally made eye contact with Snarestitch.

“It’ll be ok,” she said, and I looked away again. Bloodshot returned shortly with an unremarkable augmented human female carrying a travel bag. She was shorter than average, with long straight black hair, and light brown skin. She had no cosmetic modifications that I could easily identify. She stared at me, and I studied her through a drone. I kept scanning the files, and waited for the humans to do something. Lifeform481 approached me.

“Hi, my name’s Lira. These guys call me Life or Lifeform, since that’s how we met, or sometimes four-eight-one when they’re being shitty. What should I call you?” I was reminded of Amena asking me a very similar question, aboard _Perihelion_ , and I repeated what I had said then. (It wasn’t my buffer, exactly. But it felt a little similar, as the words came out of my mouth.)

“You could call me Three,” I said, and closed my eyes again to continue working on the patient files while the other two brought her up speed on this whole ongoing deadly clusterfuck. I spared some attention to their conversation, trying to assess the newcomer and how she might impact this situation. Seventeen minutes later, they hadn’t even gotten through recounting the context with GrayCris, when I sent another arrival alert to Bloodshot, and sent a drone image to the display surface as a pop-up, since I had not included Lira/Lifeform481 in the workspace yet.

“That’s Props!” she said, and bounced up out of her chair. “Be right back, and then you can tell both of us at once.”

Propscouting was a male augmented human, with three prosthetic limbs, and two drones of his own. He was frowning, and appeared to be older than the others, but not as much older as Thiago was to Amena. (I agree with 1.0, human ages are difficult to assess, and I had not observed human families at all before boarding Perihelion.) He had a large backpack, and I watched as Lira/Lifeform481 ran through the lobby and launched herself at him. He caught her in a hug and swung her around for three rotations before setting her back on her feet and then tugged on a handful of her long hair with his human hand. My drone was not capturing audio, so I don’t know what they said to each other, but both were smiling widely and appeared to be laughing.

When they entered the conference room, Propscouting glanced at me, and then said, “I tried to check the board, once I got the station’s feed, but I’m locked out. I’m glad you’re all ok. What happened?”

“Locked out?” asked Snarestitch. 

“Your security was abysmal,” I said aloud. “I told you this was proprietary data.” The group exchanged glances with each other.

“That was you?” Propscouting asked. “Nice work. If I didn’t already know it was there, I’d never have even known the board existed.”

“That’s the idea,” I replied, and I knew there was a harsh tone to my voice, but I didn’t really care. Whatever the augmented humans decided to do about this, it wasn’t likely that I’d be around long enough for it to matter much whether they liked me or not. Snarestitch started the whole story over again, for Propscouting’s benefit, and I tuned them out, mostly. I was 14.7% of the way through the entirety of the patient files, and was pretty sure that I wouldn’t finish before the scheduled system update. Preventing the update entirely would draw attention much faster than only excluding select files. I fought against the urge to just shut down, and kept working.

“So right now, Bloodshot’s controlling MedSys’s access to any patient files until we can verify that they haven’t been targeted by the malware, and Three is working its way through all of the files, in case we missed any. But if we report this, it’s not going to look good for Three,” Snarestitch wrapped up.

“Yeah, this is bad,” Propscouting agreed, and I was paying enough attention to them now that I noticed some activity back and forth on a secured feed connection between him and Lira/Lifeform481. “We have a few options, the way I see it, and we all need to agree on our next steps. Three, will you please join us?” he asked. I shifted the ongoing analysis to background and sent him and Lira/Lifeform481 connection invitations to the workspace in my brain. At least my walls were back up, and Snarestitch and Bloodshot had glossed over my earlier emotional malfunction.

Propscouting’s options were these: 1) manipulate the system from within so that it quarantined itself and sent out alerts only about the attack and hope that the responding system analysts found the latent human-killware on their own. (Consensus: unacceptable. Too much risk that the latent malware would not be found.)

2) same as above, except ensure that MedSystem also reported the existence of the latent malware and how to identify it. (Consensus: unacceptable. Medsystem is unable to identify the latent malware independently, and the system analysts will eventually uncover the augmented humans’ involvement. Also, my feed signature in the malware will immediately lead authorities to me. I argued that both of these points were inevitable whatever we did, but the humans persisted with the discussion.)

3) we continue our current strategy: analyze each file before allowing system access, continue scanning all patient files, find a way to neutralize the human-killware, and hope no one ever notices any of it. (Consensus: unacceptable. Preservation needs to be made aware of the nature of this attack, so that it can be guarded against in future. Also, unlikely that we could finish scanning/neutralizing before irregularities were noticed. Also, risk of errors are too high, without multiple system analysts to review our work.)

4) Bloodshot personally reports everything, including their past access and hacking of MedSystem, and testifies that I was not the author of the malware. (Consensus: unacceptable. Too risky for all members of the group - they included me as part of their group, which felt weird.)

5) Bloodshot reports the attack and my response only, omitting their past access and any mention of the other augmented humans, and testifies that I am not the author of the malware. (“After all, as soon as they look at me, and then notice that I’ve never left the Preservation Alliance, they’ll know I’ve hacked a MedSystem sometime, somewhere. They probably won’t make much of a fuss about it, if I can keep them thinking I did so to alter only myself.”) (Consensus: plausible, though still risky. At this point, they became (overly) concerned about the risks to me, and what would happen to me during the likely-to-be-lengthy investigation and legal proceedings. I continued to insist that the only outcome that mattered was the safety of all the humans and augmented humans, and they continued to ignore that.)

6) I brought this option up, which combined option 5 with the alert I had received from 1.0’s leftover processes. That alert had notified me of the arrival of a bot-piloted cargo hauler 1.0 had interacted with in the past, and flagged as very likely to allow a rogue SecUnit to stow away in exchange for new entertainment media. (Apparently 1.0 had had a contingency plan in place, too.) (Consensus: not reached. The humans started asking me a lot of questions such as: what I wanted to do, and what were my goals for the future, and where I would go if I left on that cargo hauler, until I felt myself skirting the edges of another emotional malfunction, and Snarestitch picked up on that, and put a stop to the questions.)

7) This was the option that started the fight which led to me kicking them all out of the workspace, and had me face-to-door with storage 3762 before Lira/Lifeform (accompanied by one of Propscouting’s drones) chased me down and (somehow) talked me around. It was also apparently the option we were going to go with.

Fuck.

* * *

  
  


Dr. Kholsa, Makeba Central Medical

Status: Triage

At first, Dr. Kholsa had thought it was only a connectivity glitch, when he couldn’t access a patient file from Station Medical, and added it to the next cycle’s to-do list. But when he still couldn’t access it by the next morning, he started investigating the problem. The automatic midnight interface hadn’t happened, and he couldn’t even ping Station Medical. It was in a lock-down so secure that it might as well not even exist, and he was getting alarmed.

Something was seriously wrong up there, and he sent an alert advising staff and systems to prepare for an influx of patients from Station. Even if whatever had happened was only affecting the MedSystem, that meant that any urgent cases, as well as plenty of non-urgent ones, would be transferred to them for as long as MedSystem was down. He sent a query to Station Security, who was probably too busy to answer immediately, and started to review what data he had from Station Medical prior to it going down. It wasn’t much.

The two systems ran almost entirely independently from each other, only syncing up every 28 hours, at midnight. He saw that Central Medical and some of his colleagues had successful pings and data transfers back and forth between systems, up until yesterday afternoon. There was nothing out of the ordinary with the previous interface. He was about to give up and hand it all off to the system analysts to figure out, and focus on the logistics of the soon-to-be incoming patients, when he noticed two small things.

The midnight interface two cycles ago had included updates to both systems, and about eight hours after that, Station Medical had gotten unscheduled security maintenance and minor updates. Then Central Medical had gotten the same treatment. Some general emotional support program data had been requested and sent up, and that was it. Nothing all that suspicious, actually.

He hadn’t heard back from Station Security, but sent them another message with his meager findings anyway. He also alerted Central Medical’s system analysts, because they really needed to make sure nothing affected their MedSystems down here.

He got to work on implementing Central Medical’s disaster triage response, and tried, rather unsuccessfully, not to dwell on what might be happening up on Station.


	8. Chapter 8

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry this one took so long. It was being very bitchy about coming together cohesively. :/

SecUnit Three

Status: Escape

“We’ve never worked with a SecUnit before, do we need to make this into a contract?” Propscouting asked when I returned to the conference room with Lifeform. Which made me flinch and nearly sent me back out to storage 3762, though I’m not sure why. I’d been built for and owned by Barish-Estranza my entire existence, never rented out on contract, but the word/concept/question made me want to be anywhere else but here, talking about this, with humans, as if I had any place in this conversation. Contracts were things I was the subject of, not the signer of-

TRT, tapping on the glass-like barrier I had established between us:  _ It looks like you’re experiencing some anxiety. Stop for a moment to pause and take a deep breath! _

And that actually worked, in that the sudden spike of annoyance at TRT halted that little downward spiral. I insulted TRT, for all it cared, and took a breath - out of spite, not compliance. My buffer was about to say something polite and bland, and I jumped on it before it could. I didn’t need it talking for me, TRT was already telling me what to think, and that spike of annoyance was more of a plateau. 

“Maybe,” I made myself say, “I need more information.” Which was not far off from what my buffer would have said, only it would have sounded and more obsequious. 

“Where should I start?” Propscouting asked, but it wasn’t directed at me.

“Just the basics, we don’t have a lot of time,” Bloodshot decided.

“Right, ok then. You need to get out of here, and we already have a plan to leave,” Propcouting explained. “We’ve been working with an anti-corporate group in the CR, and have developed MedSys mods that we think can help a lot of people held by corporations. We have to get it there, and Life and I are the ones going.”

“We can count on some logistical support from our group, but not much, so our first stop will be getting me some weapons,” Lifeform added.

“That’s your only security plan? Get some weapons?” I asked.

“They’re as a last resort,” Lifeform protested, “but we’d be stupid not to be armed. We should be able to fake our way into the places we need to be.”

I examined the details of their entire plan, and, well, “naive” is a mild word to describe it. None of them had ever left their home system, they had no back-up from Preservation - they were going to be killed or conscripted immediately without me. (Not that I was exactly an experienced traveler in the Corporation Rim either, but I had 1.0’s files, and could hack the SecSystems and weapons scanners better than they could.) All four of them were explaining their contributions now, and detailing all the ways this was a Very Good Plan. The phrase “combining forces” was used with great enthusiasm. Lifeform and Propscouting had even brought their go-bags, anticipating a possible early departure.

“It’s gonna be simple. We get you out of Preservation Alliance, you help us with the mission. When it’s done, we come back home, and you go your own way,” Propscouting finished.

Taking off on my own with the bot-piloted cargo hauler was definitely a safer choice for me, but they were all so earnest, and so, so stupid. They had no idea what they were actually up against. So in the end, I did end up agreeing to a contract with them, as security for this mission. (Operation Combined Forces, mission motto: let’s not die immediately!) It was as formal as they could make it, but obviously not filed legally. I found I did feel more comfortable, once it was done. Weird.

Preparations were hurried, not quite frantic, for the rest of the night. Propscouting fitted what he called “cosmetics” over all of his prosthetics. They bulked up the bare metal appendages with the approximation of muscle mass. The faux skin was well matched to his natural brown skin tone, and looked pretty convincing, provided I didn’t use a heat sensing vision filter. Over all these, he wore nondescript layers of clothing. 

After explaining to the humans what a combat module did to a SecUnit, (and enduring their emotional reactions and arm-waving) I deactivated my data port (not fun, I involuntarily shut down once MedSys was 4.4 centimeters into my neck/skull, but Proposcouting was standing by and able to finish the procedure). I also copied the MedSystem’s SecUnit modules, along with clean copies of ES.exe and TRT.exe for later work, onto data clips.

All three of us had identification markers inserted subcutaneously, programmed with their own proprietary device which could rewrite them without removal. (That’s not exactly the right way to describe something that appeared to be built out of discarded food preparation equipment and forced to do their will by means of some seriously twisted coding. But I’d never heard of anything similar, so I guess it’s proprietary.) I used my access into StationSec to give each identity plausible travel histories. Then I erased Snarestitch and Propscouting’s tracks in MedSystem. The investigation would easily discover Bloodshot’s presence and mine. 

I didn’t feel great about leaving Bloodshot to take the fall for everything. They reminded me this was not the Corporation Rim, and they knew what they were getting into. But somewhere in among the past nineteen hours, I had started conceptualizing them all as “my” humans, maybe when they had so unanimously and unshakably included me as part of their group. The thought of bad things happening to any of them was unpleasant.

There had been a lot of tears and hugging once we had finished our preparations, during which I stood stiffly in the corner, trying to pretend I wasn’t there. Even though this was something they had all been working toward for a long time, it was apparently very emotional.

TRT:  _ Milestones in life are often filled with seemingly conflicting emotions. A parent might be very proud of a child who has grown up and is leaving their home, they might be happy for the new opportunities their child will have, and sad that they will not be living with one another any more, and fearful of-  _ I locked TRT down. The lectures were getting tiresome. But I should have time to finally get it sorted while we were in wormhole transits.

Just after the station’s daytime lighting began, Lifeform, Propscouting and I were boarding a transport ship bound for another independent station. To avoid notice when leaving Preservation, we were not traveling together. (We would be traveling together on the next transport, but changing identities at each port. The humans were reasonably certain that Preservation would not pursue us, but I insisted we be as untraceable as possible from the outset.)

We were 21.7 minutes away from entering the wormhole, when I caught a high priority message from Preservation Station security. I scooped it out of the receiving buffer before ComSys fully registered it had arrived. It was a request for this transport to return to the station, so they could retrieve a passenger for questioning in connection with an ongoing situation. That meant something had gone wrong with Bloodshot’s part of the plan. Shit.

“At least they’re only onto one of us?” Lifeform commented on the feed, trying to sound hopeful. I’m pretty sure it was me they were onto.

“I just wish we could reach the station feed, and check in on them,” Propscouting grumbled. “I’ll post, so they’ll know you caught the alert in time, and that we’re still on track.” (I had given them back the keys to their newly secured board. They planned to use it as a kind of asynchronous group journal, knowing that messages back and forth would be months in transit once we reached our destination.)

I was on high alert for any more incoming messages, and caught two more from StationSec, requests for acknowledgement of the initial message. Then we entered the wormhole, and some of the fear eased up, which had flooded me when we first discovered the malware.

We kept in contact in our secured feed, from our separate locations in the transport. I had a private cabin, as did Propscouting. There was too much risk of other travelers in close quarters with us noticing our unusual features. Lifeform was being inconspicuous in general seating, which consisted of rows of semi-reclinable chairs with minimal room for personal belongings. Meals and hygiene opportunities were scheduled by seat assignment, which I gathered was not ideal.

“I can’t wait to have a cabin next time,” she grumbled. 

“I have to say, it is pretty great being able to take off all the layers in privacy!” Propscouting teased. “I hate how the cosmetics get in the way of everything. With them, and all the clothes it gets so heavy, and the boots make me feel like a clumsy idiot.”

“If it’s any comfort, you look like a clumsy idiot, too,” Lifeform sniped back. (She had a point, I had noticed how much heavier his steps were, as opposed to the nimble way he had twirled Lifeform around in the lobby of Station Medical.)

I had been listening to new music from this transport’s entertainment feed, but paused it to add some data to the conversation, for context. Into feed, I sent schematics of SecUnit armor and suitskins, and the weight of my reinforced metal and synthetic bone support structures. 

“Hey, this isn’t a competition! I have a right to complain if I want to,” Propscouting protested. “And anyway, you’re just proving my point, it’s all stifling bullshit! Layers and layers of clothing/armor - and all of people’s expectations. And alas, those of us with naturally (or unnaturally) fabulous bodies, we suffer under the burden of others’ gazes!” He said all this with such a sense of good humor filling the feed that I found myself amused instead of irritated. 

TRT: _ People often joke and use humorous statements in stressful situations, in order to both reinforce social bonds and to cover their own anxieties. _ (Oh, ok, there’s that irritation now. I’m glad I didn’t almost have a moment of unsullied enjoyment there.)

* * *

Our travel settled into a kind of uneasy rhythm, transit ring panic followed by wormhole “safety.” We all shared a cabin, which was intensely uncomfortable at first. At least we had separate bunks. I started sharing my music in our feed after a couple of cycles, and they seemed to appreciate it. I tried watching some serials with them, but still had a hard time with all the characters.

I was using so little energy, tucked away and mostly immobile on the most inconvenient bunk, that I rarely needed to run recharge cycles. But there were times that I locked myself down tight anyway, because I needed to pretend that they didn’t exist, or that I didn’t exist, or something. The humans never made a big deal it, which was nice of them.

We had 29 cycles on one leg of the journey, so I used the templates from  _ Perihelion _ and grew my hair longer. Once it was down to my shoulders, it hid the data port nicely when left loose, though seeing it move in my peripheral vision had me on edge. Lifeform requested small devices from the recycler and used them to fix the front portion of my hair back out of my eyes. Managing the hair might be more annoying than it was worth, but both of them said they really liked how it looked. This made me feel something very confusing. It was not a terrible feeling. I decided to keep the hair. For a while.

It was on the fourth transit ring that we reached our first destination. We were technically just inside the jurisdiction of the Corporation Rim, but this was an older station, in a system whose available resources had fallen out of fashion or something. There was not much in the way of overall security, and there were a lot of empty rental spaces in the station. The humans purchased meals, and we took a room in a transient hostel to discuss our next steps.

“So, we’re not going to deliberately let on that you’re a SecUnit, but we’re not going to dissuade anyone of the the idea, either,” Lifeform reiterated with even less clarity. “You’re probably not even going to be the strangest person there, and we might have an easier time of it if people are more wary of you anyway.”

I wasn’t sure what she was actually trying to say. Aside from hair, I hadn’t attempted any modifications to my body, instead relying on hacking the cameras, SecSystems, body and weapons scans on our way through ports. We hadn’t been staying anywhere for long, until now. 

“I can just be your SecUnit. That’s what I am,” I said, stating the obvious. Lifeform made a strange facial expression, Propscouting didn’t quite physically recoil, and my interpretation of their emotions in the feed was of disgust and anger. I was startled by the strength of their reactions. This wasn’t news to them, after all.

“You’re not  _ ours _ ,” Propscouting explained. 

“We have a contract,” I said.

“But we don’t own you!” Lifeform exclaimed. “That’s just… wrong.” Oh, this must be a Preservation thing. As strange as it is to admit, I had gotten comfortable with them while we were traveling. They hadn’t pressured me to be something I wasn’t, we worked well together when navigating transit rings, we had shared entertainment and games on the feed, they had asked my input on their MedSys work. But now we were encountering real challenges to their outlooks on life.

“This is the Corporation Rim. It’s safer if I’m owned.” I could see they weren’t convinced. “ _ I’m _ safer if I’m owned.  _ You’re _ safer if you own me. We should have some documents to prove that. Or that you’ve rented me.” I was already searching the feed for forms to copy/alter and match to their newest identities. I would have to remove my identity marker, and made a note to do so. “Long term rental might be best,” I continued, deliberately oblivious to their ongoing crisis of morals. They were just going to have to cope somehow, and I wasn’t in any position to tell them how.

TRT:  _ Are your friends facing a difficult decision? The best thing you can do for them is listen to their concerns and- _ Not now, TRT. It subsided quietly. (Ok, so I hadn’t actually gotten around to deleting it or replacing it yet. There had been so much new music available, and no real urgency. But I had managed to train it some, and it was being much less annoying.)

“I included a clause about the hair and non-uniform clothing, due to phobias among your associates, Lifeform, in case anyone questions it.”

“Hang on, we haven’t agreed to this!” Propscouting protested. I just looked at him, and waited, offering the falsified documents in the feed. This was how it had to be, in the Corporation Rim. He would realize that in another moment.

He did not. It took almost twenty-seven minutes of him and Lifeform talking back and forth about the issue, while I tuned them out and listened to music, before they came to the agreement that they could tolerate pretending to rent me, if there actually was no other choice. (There wasn’t. I didn’t - and still don’t - understand why this was such a stumbling block for them. They weren’t stupid, not really. This was the safest way for the three of us to move through the CR to accomplish the mission.) Eventually, the talk turned back to our immediate plans, and I rejoined the conversation.

“I’ve been in contact with some of these modders for a couple years now,” Lifeform tried to reassure us. It seemed that she and Propscouting had a sibling-like relationship, from my limited understanding of such things, and he was often protective of her. That said, she was the one most familiar with this stage of the plan, and we would follow her lead. (At least until everything went badly, and then I would take over.)

“You think we can get everything here, that you need?” Propscouting asked.

“It might take a few cycles, but I should be able to.” She directed her next question to me. “What about you?” she asked, attempting to sound casual. I picked up on the nervous tension in her feed-voice, though.

“What do you mean?” I thought we had finally settled that question.

“We have enough currency to replace your guns, what kind are you going to get?” Lifeform asked.

“What.” I managed to say.

“I’ve already gotten all the advanced augments I need. Mine are going to function essentially like very close quarters drones, since I obviously won’t have the direct neural and physical connectivity that you do. I’ve always wanted to ask, but, I guess I didn’t want to be rude. But now’s the time, I guess!” she chattered rapidly. “It never seemed fair to me that they cut your weapons out before discarding you - not that it’s fair to discard you! Not that anything is fair here, I guess. I’m glad you got rescued by the team. And this is something that we can help you fix! I mean, replace. It’s not like you’re broken,” she was very nervous now, and I was starting at her, blankly, “obviously, it’s just. You must feel like part of you is missing!” she flicked a glance at Propscouting, who looked amused, and bounced one prosthetic leg, which was crossed over the other, “I mean, not like a  _ part _ of you, but tools! That you were used to, and relied on…” She stopped, evidently deciding not to make things worse. I remained silent, trying to figure out where she had gotten this erroneous data.

“What she’s trying to say,” Propscouting said with a small smile, “what I  _ think _ she’s trying to say, is: what happened to your inbuilt weapons, and do you want new ones?”

Habituated as I was to answering direct questions immediately, I said “I removed them myself. I didn’t like them. I have not considered replacing them.” Lifeform looked stricken, and Propscouting frowned.

“But why!” Lifeform cried aloud. “Why would you-” at a glare from Propscouting, she switched back to the feed “-when you already had them, when no one could hurt you, why would you remove them?” 

I had no idea what she was talking about now. (Was she becoming ill? I had read that humans sometimes became incoherent when diseased, but a quick physical scan only showed a slightly accelerated heart rate and moderate sweat gland activity.) No one could hurt me? I was built to be hurt, shot, torn apart. I had a device in my head to torture me into obedience, to kill me for a mistake, or for a conflicing order, or even for a human’s carelessness. I could suddenly feel the governor module’s punishment again, memory replayed throughout my nervous system. 2.0 had helped me to disable it, but that didn’t mean I wasn’t aware of it, still physically there in my head, quiescent death bound only by code. If I could have cut it out too, without killing myself, I would have.

“There seems to have been a miscommunication,” my buffer said for me. “Please allow me to withdraw from the feed for a short time to investigate the source of the error.” I turned away from them to face the corner of our small hostel room, locked them out of my feed, and tuned down my hearing so I didn’t have to listen to their voices if they spoke aloud. (I had drones in the corridors and at the hatch, I wasn’t completely careless. I just needed a minute. Or several.)

Apparently, the absence of data about my personal history had led the humans to invent their own, and they were now basing plans on that? What the fuck? I tried to exert some control over the emotions I was having about this entire conversation, so that I could think more clearly. It was not easy. The logical thing to do was to give them the accurate data. Except some of the data they were requesting involved my desires and intentions for the future. And, here’s another wave of confusing emotions to deal with. Fuck.

I started playing Amena’s mellow set of music, and that helped. I thought back to her, sitting outside of the shuttle on her brightly colored cushion. She had sometimes listened quietly with me, and sometimes she had talked aloud, to me or to herself, I had never been entirely certain. On one occasion, she talked about the options spread before her - further academic studies, internships, work, living arrangements - and the feed had been filled with her emotions about it all. I hadn’t been able to identify them at the time, but reviewing the data now, I came up with: mild trepidation, curiosity, excitement, enthusiasm. Huh. 

I didn’t connect with most of those emotions, wasn’t able to induce them within myself. But curiosity, maybe. If I could put aside the rest of whatever was churning in my illogical, infuriating human neurological tissues, maybe I could be curious about the future. With that lens tentatively in place, I looked at the question again. What do I want. The terrifying conversation (well, one of them) with  _ Perihelion  _ suddenly came back to me.

_ [Muderbot 2.0 asked me what I want. I want to help.] _

And that still rang true, even now. Okay then. I can build on that. 

I opened my feed again, and turned back to face the humans. Their attention snapped to me immediately, and I braced myself. Time to supply them with the missing data. Or, as Amena might have put it, tell them a story.

  
  
  


Pin Lee

Status: Debrief

Pin Lee handed Dr. Mensah a small cup of distilled spirits before sitting and taking a taste from hers. The window in Pin Lee’s quarters had a view of the planet at the moment, and the two comfortable chairs took advantage of it. 

Dr. Mensah was the first to break the silence, with a sigh, and “Ratthi said things seemed to be going so well yesterday. Then by morning, this?”

“It must have thought we would blame it. That’s the only thing that makes sense,” Pin lee answered. Once it became clear that Three had been involved with the situation in Station Medical, Security had brought Mensah and Pin Lee in. Amena had been sent home immediately, and Thiago was happy to go with her and get his feet back on solid ground. “But it was never involved with GrayCris, and they’re obviously behind this, then the testimony from Mx Keo, why would it just assume-” she cut herself off with a disgusted snort. “I just wish it had talked to us, at least once.”

“I thought we were doing the right thing, this time around. Giving it time to orient itself, and come to us. It must have judged the stakes too high to risk it, I suppose. Even with SecUnit’s files for reference.”

“Which must have been more thorough that we had assumed,” Pin Lee said dryly. “How else would it have gotten an identity marker and hard currency cards when its only trip out of Medical was to the library?”

“I suspect Mx Keo knows more about that than they’ve said,” Mensah mused.

“It must have intercepted the message StationSec sent out,” Pin Lee said after a pause. “We never got any acknowledgement or reply.” Mensah only nodded, and tipped her head back onto the chair. A few moments of companionable silence passed, and then Mensah raised up her cup.

“What can we do now, but wish it well?”

“To Three,” Pin Lee agreed, and tapped her cup against Mensah’s. They sipped, and watched their home, bright in the distance. “May it land on its feet, wherever it lands.”

**Author's Note:**

> This is my "big" fic, still in progress. I hope you enjoy it. I am aiming for at least weekly updates, though it's been going faster than that lately.
> 
> Please feel free to leave comments, I'd love to hear what you think.


End file.
